When I turned on the music and chatter, the first audio that played was of a chimpanzee wildly shrieking for about 2 seconds. The song which played after was “Sonargaon” by Daniel Masson, which as far as I can tell does not include that audio. Maybe someone at the KSFO Tower was having a bad day. Very funny.
What’s odd is when you read popular Reddit comments, you find the userbase believes that the site is full of pro-Trump bots and shills.
My politics are to the left of the American left, but I’d be crazy to believe that the mountains of the anti-Trump posts are organic & the spoonfuls of pro-Trump posts are paid, especially after an election where Trump won the popular vote.
The English speaking world outside of the US is left of Democrats and generally hates Trump, and not everyone on Reddit is USAmerican. Reddit is going to be left of the US and also not representative of the US.
My experience with my ADHD diagnosis and the 25 years of Adderall that followed have left me jaded at the state of psychiatry.
The focus of my attention does indeed change at a rate which is faster than average. If something can distract me from a task, then it usually does, at least for a few moments. But why is this classified as a deficiency and a disorder? In other words, why is directed attention considered the normal human experience?
To me, it seems obvious. My attention is considered deficient because we have constructed a society in which we expect children as young as 8 (that was the age I was diagnosed) to focus in a classroom on highly abstract topics (history, language, math, etc.) for hours at a time without issue. If a child can’t meet that expectation, then they will be medicated until they do.
But if we lived in a different society, especially one set in pre-modern times, then my kind of attention might not be considered a disorder. It could even be advantageous. How many early humans suffered a premature death because their hyper-focus on gathering berries left them oblivious to the rustling of leaves?
Disability is in general relative to the expextations of a particular society. There are people who can't tell a minor and a major third apart - they won't make a career in music probably, but it's not considered a disability or disorder.
Being unable to focus attention is not a beneficial trait in current society. Imagine having to have to take regular medication to control your blood pressure but cannot keep track of your regimen. It requires extra effort to keep the person healthy. Another is tackling difficult and long-term cognitive tasks, which is often necessary to function in society nowadays (I dread filing taxes). This may change in the future (especially with AI) but right now it is the way it is.
There are many traits that are advantageous in one environment and not in another: for example, sickle-cell phenotype became prevalent in regions where malaria was common, because you are likely to survive the infection. But otherwise the individual is likely to suffer from sickle cell anemia. People who have low calorie requirement may survive a famine, but may suffer from obesity in calorie-rich environment.
Many things are hard enough for “normal” person who would not be perceived as having ADHD, but it’s more so for people with it. The expectations are set by the modern society, but the actual challenges for ADHD are naturally present - thus they are classified as disorder. It’s commonly debilitating enough to be recognized as one.
> But why is this classified as a deficiency and a disorder
I think it’s because it’s outside of your control. Ideally you would be able to choose which impulses you want to respond to, and with ADHD that’s extremely hard.
ADHD for academic performance is not a problem, but it can be disruptive in a classroom. Until fairly recently, it wasn't medicated. Can't follow along? You'll just have to do lower levels. If you're medicated out of expectation, that's on your parents.
> How many early humans ...
That's a highly speculative argument for returning to the stone age?
> But why is this classified as a deficiency and a disorder? In other words, why is directed attention considered the normal human experience?
"In other words"... no, those are separate things.
"Normal" means being like most of the rest of the group. My being 6'3" isn't normal here, but iirc would be normal in parts of the Netherlands.
A deficiency or disorder is something that causes problems. And getting people to just declare that something isn't a disorder won't actually change anything, because the language is downstream of the reality of what skills or abilities are needed for what roles in society.
A lot of that is true. Evolutionary advantage is always relative to the environment.
ADHD can have material impact on other aspects of your life though not just stuff related to studies or cognitive jobs.
A recent bit of research linked ADHD to shorter life expectancy (7-9 years). Reasons probably vary but I'd wager a big part of it is that those with ADHD can have a much harder time keeping up with regular life maintenance, including matters of personal health.
Making that doctor's appointment for a checkup or cancer screening is always 5 minutes away. Encountering even the least bit of unexpected friction can derail you even when you manage to get moving. Next thing you know, 6 months have gone by.
I’m curious to know if medication helped you conform to the societal expectation regarding attention, and whether you experienced other effects from it (positive, negative).
I’d value anecdata to know more and decide whether to push back if school starts pressuring for an adhd evaluation which is usually for an ulterior goal of medicating the kid.
What I do is use RateYourMusic.com and find people who rate albums similar to the way I do. The site even lets you build music charts and filter albums by how highly they’re rated by the users you follow.
The very verse I was about to post! (Though I was going to quote it as more customarily and literally translated, “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the LORD.”)
To add interest: there are plenty of people who firmly believe this, and make decisions by the drawing of lots, in various possible forms. I’m one. It’s taken me in interesting and unexpected directions this year.
The second graph in that article ("The Partisan Gap on Economy Ratings") is alarming. In mid-2016, ~30% of Republicans said the economy was doing good. By mid-2017, that figure passed ~80%. By comparison, optimism among Democrats fell from ~70% to ~55% over that same time period.
I wonder if we'll make it to March 2025 before half of Republicans once again say that the economy is doing quite well.
That graph, by using rolling averages, makes the transition look less dramatic than it actually was. Expectation of future economy among Republicans in the U. Michigan survey fell by a full third in November 2020, immediately after the election.
> No, that's just something you read on a blog written by a guy who would go on to write that women shouldn't get wage equality because they would have to work more dangerous jobs and thus die more, because apparently saving the lives of man by making those jobs safer is impossible.
What am I missing here? Is it possible to make the workplace injury rate among linemen comparable to the rate among social workers?
That the full argument amounted had this weird structure where women should be excluded from some jobs without complaint because of the danger, but simultaneously there was no interest in making the jobs safer!
So that men work more in dangerous jobs wasn't a problem, instead that was a proper, "of course men should die more" sort of thing because it motivated the pay gap.
So the argument becomes that men should die so the pay gap is sustained, which doesn't seem like a great thing to declare triumphantly?
Because none of those things have the force of law backing them.
Academic censorship? Start your own journal and publish there. Religious censorship? Start your own church and gather your followers. Forum censored you? Start your own website where they have zero say about anything and write about whatever you want.
Government censorship? You are screwed, and you go straight to jail if you try to break free and start your own.
Because not everyone who can write an academic article also has the ability to establish and run an entire publishing business.
Just because they technically could doesn't mean they realistically can.
I once moved towns and needed to cancel my LA Fitness gym membership. I found that they wanted me to go to their website, find the Cancellation Form, print it out, fill it out with my account details, and mail or fax it to their corporate office. I don’t believe there is any way of cancelling it online or over the phone.
So instead of doing that all of that, I called my credit card company and asked them to block all future charges from the company. It worked like a charm.
It is up to the company to not pursue you for the money. Contractually, you probably still owe them the money, unless there is a clause in the contract that says that non-payment is a way to cancel the membership. They could legally pursue that, or sell it to someone else to pursue.
Not paying is not the same thing as not owing. Many companies will just let it drop. Some won't
Eh it's probably not enforceable so long as you did something reasonable— sent a letter, sent an email and then stopped payment.
Taken to absurdity they can't make you lick your elbow in order to cancel and making you jump through arbitrary hoops when an email to their support is perfectly sufficient probably falls on your side.
The something reasonable is almost certainly going to be explicitly defined in the contract that you sign (terms and conditions).
If one of the conditions is that you can't cancel without showing up in person or sending a notarized letter and giving 90 days notice, courts would find that enforceable if that's what you agreed to. Many online services will just allow you to cancel by stopping payment, many won't. That's why regulations like this are important, sleazy companies, like gyms and Adobe, are great at burying terms deep in their terms that are just on the right side of legally enforceable, but not reasonable to a normal person. The courts have to go with precedent and the law, even when it isn't 'common sense'.
If there isn't a prior contract or you never signed a terms and conditions, then sure, just stop payment, but almost any business is going to have a contract.
