So if you feel like you are getting more ADHD-like issues, do consider a sleep study. Early tells are easy: you often feel like shit in the morning.
I also noticed my issues were worse after my 3rd bout of covid :-/ I had very high sensitivity to alcohol and caffeine after the 2nd bout and have largely cut both out of my life (I never drank more than 20 drinks / year in my life anyway).
I got one from my dentist for way too much money, it broke, so instead I got a "snore reducing mouthpiece" from ZQuiet or SnoreRX which is basically the exact same thing but they haven't done a clinical study to show it reduces sleep apnea. I wear one every night along with a nose strip (like Breathe Right, but a different brand that I like better) and my mornings feel like I was hung over are long gone.
You should be using LLM agents anyway. It's the solution to every problem.
The only limit is yourself.
This doesn't seem factual, or at the very least, not that simple?
https://www.epicresearch.org/articles/two-years-after-stoppi...
There is evidence that is not the case though https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8878541/
I think they were referring to rebound weight though, something else I'd heard about these drugs that also doesn't affect everyone. A scarier one was one person whose weight got too low so they stopped taking it, but for some reason had a lot of trouble gaining any weight and getting up to a healthy level.
> In 2021, society is driven by a virtual Internet, which has created a degenerative effect called "nerve attenuation syndrome" or NAS.
Even more hilariously given the purveyors of the distractions we're discussing in this thread:
> Megacorporations control much of the world, intensifying the class hostility already created by NAS.
Bread and circuses, etc. I believe that given our cultural trajectory one's ability to lint their cognitive intake (that is keep TikTok/Insta/YouTube/podcast garbage viewership to a minimum) will be a large predictor of success. The next generation of doctors and Nobel Prize winners probably won't be watching boobies videos and Minecraft play-throughs.
Or they will be, and we will have an even bigger problem..
During the weekends when I am not occupied with a task I often fall asleep. This happens on the first day or two of vacation also. After a few days my brain acclimates to the pace.
Definitely feels like that, with the exception of task initiation. I am capable of deep focus work, but I can't control when (or where). I can block out time on my calendar all I want, if my brain says "Nope, we're not doing work today" then I'm not doing work, interruptions or not.
It becomes a real disability in the workplace when everything is defined by more or less rigid schedules and your mode of operating is not a schedule but "whenever my brain says so." Some days that might be 7am, other days its 1am, and sometimes it's an entire week or two of not being able to get jack done and then staying up all night and getting 15 business hours worth of work done at once because you physically can't pull yourself away.
I always tell people, its not a deficit of attention, I have plenty of that. Its an inability to direct where and what that attention is on.
I had some success in small startups where I was left to my own devices and built cool stuff whenever I felt the urge to do so.
In corporate jobs I just have to lie and describe smooth and steady daily progress while actually working in sudden fits and starts, but it's hard to maintain the lie.
Yeah, ADHD is very poorly named unfortunately. It really is not an attention disorder, it's an executive function disorder
I’ve got a few dozen quarter finished projects still waiting in line…
This is normal for any "knowledge" employee or professional, or basically any job that is not strictly defined as doing one or a small number of fixed tasks such as on an assembly line.
This is actually something that is pretty misunderstood about ADHD.
People with ADHD don't actually struggle with attention. They struggle with executive function, because their brains don't produce/consume/manage dopamine correctly
Somewhat ironically, Hyperfocus is also a symptom of ADHD. When ADHD people are doing something that is rewarding (producing dopamine) to their brains they might be really hard to pull away from it. It's really common for ADHD people to be able to sit and play videogames for hours on end, because it is giving them dopamine. Ask them to sit and do spreadsheets and they can't sit still and they look "attention deficit". But attention isn't a problem when they're engaged with the work!
I have ADHD, and I really enjoy coding and building stuff. I can't sit still for more than two seconds when I try to use LLMs to build software though. I need to be more hands on than that. Same goal, same process, different execution, completely different experience for me. I don't feel accomplished or rewarded when the LLM writes a function for me compared to writing it myself.
OP is talking about something environmental that can affect anyone.
> Educated women delay the onset of childbearing and have fewer children overall compared with less-educated women
There's a whole conversation to have about the assumptions in that. Is the implication it's genetic? The children of lower educated people aren't capable of moving to greater things? Or is it societal, that our education system fails the poor and doesn't give them the tools they need to thrive?
The movie isn't really interested in interrogating any of that and I don't think it needs to. Like I said, I see it as a fun movie that isn't that deep. But there's a common thread of opinion on the movie that holds it up as a biting satire ("Idiocracy is a documentary!" is essentially a meme at this point) and those folks don't seem to engage with the topic either. A worrying number of people seem to have a takeaway of "poor people shouldn't procreate as much".
Anyway, to bring it back to the actual topic at hand (and why I originally replied): I think something like VAST goes directly against what Idiocracy implies. We're all potential victims to distractions that reduce our capacity for executive function. A more accurate movie might show people of all financial and educational achievement glued to endless social media feeds.
I disagree with the extremes.
Why wouldn't self defense be number one, in many cases/times?
Why wouldn't we simply stop spending on education at break even ROI? (to be clear that's not the same as the education creates a salary bump equal to the tuition ... there are Nth order effects of education that should be priced into my point)
And even if the premise of Idiocracy were true, less intelligent people aren't worth less than more intelligent people. That's the "eugenics-y vibe" problem mentioned earlier that makes the movie uncomfortable for some people.
Yes, they obviously are? Just an absurd thing to state.
Yes, higher education rates lead to lower birth rates. The movie still has eugenics vibes, by implying that the “wrong kind of people” are reproducing.
The Idiocracy line that I think about the most these days is "Brawndo stock dropped to zero and the computer did that auto-layoff thing to everybody."
The premise is just a silly one so that there's a plot-based reason to show an exaggerated version of what was already happening culturally. It's not intended to be the point of the movie.
…and if you do credit it with incisive societal commentary you kind of have to engage with the weird implications of what it's saying rather than just come away feeling superior about not being one of the dumb underclass.
The fun in idiocy is the "isnt this dumb!" take on a bunch of society that is one big dumb step worse than current life but certainly recognizable.
Everything turned into advertising. Costco expanding into everything. Brainless tv and the related celebrities (that people love for the gimmick but don't give a shit about as people). Health care that only supports a diagnosis by matching to a few kid-friendly tiles. Politics as professional wrestling, nepotism, incompetence, and overpromising. For a related laugh, go look at one of the online quizzes from 2016 about "which of these ten quotes are from a real presidential candidate and which are from president comacho".
Idiocracy is a fun, silly satire that is nearly a cartoon, from a bunch of folks who made a bunch of successful social commentary cartoons. It very much isn't a eugenics story - if Mike judge were actually writing that as the intent I think it would be dark and with a vicious ruling class.
The civil servants are addicted to their personal TV and only pause watching it compulsively when the boss comes around. As soon as the boss is out of sight they resume their fixation.
From memory it is a loop of a cowboy galloping on a horse.
Citizens have one single piece of identification, and it's not even electronic. Their location is only tracked when discrete scanners manage to see that identification. Medical care is provided promptly. Joe Bowers's court case wasn't decided by political meddling, and the two minute hates were only focused on him after he was found guilty. There are security holes in the implementation of the prison that allow intelligent individuals to escape the machine. The president has leadership, speaking ability, policy planning, honesty, work ethic, intelligence, humility, and outright patriotism. Starbucks seems like respectable open employment for adults rather than children being trafficked to some island in secret. Joe Bower's aptitude was eventually recognized and appreciated - the society wants to get better.
Like all sci-fi, Idiocracy was largely a reflection of the society it was written in. A society that had values we've long since given up on.
In the introduction to Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman said that the contemporary world was better reflected by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, whose public was oppressed by their addiction to amusement, rather than by Orwell's work, where they were oppressed by state violence.
Thanks for the reminder to read this.
"Alien species may isolate themselves in virtual worlds"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Hypothetical_exp...
"The person finds it difficult to control the worry.... The anxiety, worry, or physical symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning." DSM-IV/V
Some of the strategies used to help people with ADHD are used to help with VAST-related loss of focus and procrastination, but medication is probably not recommended for those diagnosed as not having ADHD but likely having VAST.
It sounds similar but almost coming at it from the opposite angle. ADHD is when your brain's baseline is not producing or using dopamine properly. VAST almost sounds like a sort of burnout, where your brain is overwhelmed and cannot process stuff anymore. The symptoms are the same, the effects are the same, but the cause is different.
ADHD root cause is internal lack of stimulation, VAST root cause is external overwhelming stimulation. That's how I understand things anyways
Point is I think MOST mental illness is the modern world. If you dumped people with severe depression into their ancestors supposedly worse lives 6,0000 years ago, hunting with tribe and sleeping under starry sky, they’d be fine.
This is an interesting way to try to put a label on someone’s behavioral conditioning. One of the common, and growing, problems with Internet discussions of ADHD is that they’ve expanded so much that most young people growing up in a connected world can identity with some influencer’s description of ADHD. Working with young, tech-interested students is worrying right now because across every group you will find most of them saying some variation of believing that they have ADHD. Their basis is usually a combination of Reddit posts and something from a streamer or content creator they follow.
Yet most of them don’t have anything resembling focus or executive function problems. I think those with ADHD diagnoses from youth just don’t talk about it much. It’s the people who discovered it on social media who are bringing it up the most in this context. The basis for their belief that they have ADHD is more about feeling that self-discipline is easy and enjoyable for “normies” and the fact that they have to put in some effort to study and keep their room clean instead of watching YouTube and playing video games is indicative of a condition.
The old way of trying to draw a line between people who are neurodivergent and neurotypical doesn’t really work on those who came up reading those terms on the internet. For various reasons, the majority of them have come to view themselves as neurodivergent in some way, even when they clearly don’t meet any intended definition of that word. In the teenage years it has almost become an extension of the youthful belief that nobody understands you because you’re different and you see the world uniquely. Along come all of the TikTok creators to explain that these feelings are abnormal and come with all these labels you should apply to yourself. Now they believe that they are neurodivergent and start collecting self-diagnoses.
Having a different set of labels could be an interesting way to try to change this dynamic. Instead of one label that’s supposed to represent the entire spectrum from people who cannot function in normal life to the guy who is getting As in all of his classes but feels like studying isn’t as easy as it should be, it might be time to offer some labels for the lighter end of the spectrum so we can get back to using the heavy medical diagnoses to mean something significant.
There’s an entire other conversation about how the dilution of diagnoses like ADHD is causing harm to those with serious ADHD because the term doesn’t mean as much any more. Extra labels for mimic conditions or behavioral/personality variants could be a good way to relieve some of that pressure.
Can you elaborate on what symptoms do people with ADHD have that the ADHD “sympathizers” don’t? How can one analyze themselves “on close inspection” to know if they truly have ADHD?
If you're concerned I strongly recommend you speak with a professional. Everyone's ADHD manifest in slightly different ways and nobody on the internet can diagnose you.