erlich

What is missing is a graph of all the data and its relationships. Then its just a matter of grouping things together appropriately for humans to understand.

It's funny how a graph underlies absolutely everything but no one seems to use them.

> I do appreciate this conversation

Me too :)

I like discussions like these because its always an opportunity to absorb more information.

Why should 6 symptoms constitute ADHD while 5 don't?

The person with only 5 doesn't have it?

This is not science.

Change the diagnostic criteria to a blood test or brain scan and then we are in the realm of proper science. But until then the burden of proof should be on the ADHD community not on those trying to dispute it. It's like having to use proper science to disprove something that is not conclusively proved in science.

It's fine to publish all this science and evidence, but it all comes back to the diagnostic criteria which is so wishy washy. The diagnostic criteria has evolved from a completely arbitrary definition. There is no reason the DSM stuff should be used at all, and trying to find science to support a diagnostic criteria that was arbitrary to begin with is silly.

That's why, after all this, the main point I make is that the boundary between ADHD and non-ADHD is arbitrary and will always be and its more about having a disorder to point to to be able to prescribe stimulants to "people it would help".

Mark my words: there will never be a biomarker or test used to diagnose this condition because it would only reduce the number of people who can access treatment.

It's an elaborate exercise on how to be allowed to use a scheduled medication as treatment. If the government didn't ban drugs then all this ADHD diagnosis stuff wouldn't exist at all. It would be the reverse exercise: which people should not be allowed it because they abuse it and it negatively impacts them.

Amphetamine used to be legal.

As an example, President JFK received regular injections containing high doses of amphetamines from his personal physician.

Then the risk of abuse and side-effects in the population were observed and it was banned.

Did JFK have ADHD? No, it just helped him with energy levels. Like it would anyone.

There are no conclusive bio-markers for ADHD. Therefore its not possible to say who doesn't have it and should not get stimulant medication.

The only commonality is that there is an impairment. It's not possible to say: this person has difficulty focusing and has ADHD but this person has difficulty focusing but doesn't have ADHD.

The board of psychiatrists who decide what symptoms constitute it just essentially make it up.

The only thing that is real and measurable is the level of impairment to someone's life.

Stimulant medications works, but it would work for anyone regardless of an ADHD cause. ADHD is like a catch-all for people who can't focus that doesn't match any other condition that could be resolved differently.

Stimulant medication definitely carries risks and health impacts. This is black and white.

People are way too happy when they find out that the treatment is taking speed every day for their whole life, as if this isn't going to take its toll on the body and that the brain is not going to adapt to this.

The biggest risk for ADHD treatment is that most diagnosed people are told: "you brain doesn't make enough dopamine" which makes it feel safe for you and why they say non-ADHD people cannot take it.

But for your specific brain it does make enough and it will fight to maintain that via homeostasis (usually by creating more dopamine vacuums/re-uptakes that stick around a long time...there is good science on this).

So you become dependent on the medication and tolerance can occur making your situation worse than it was in the end.

ADHD-as-a-diagnosis is just a clever way to make the government okay with prescribing stimulant medication to "people who it can help" and having someone safely monitor its usage, and to assure the government that we won't end up with too large of percentage of the population taking it.

ChatGPT's take was that 10 ADHD people/animals would go exploring and if one produced a new source of food then it would be advantageous for the group, but the other 9 could fail and be completely useless. A bit like venture capital funds haha.

So there is still room for complete failure in life, and maybe its a lot of luck/environment that some ADHD people succeed naturally.

I actually like the SQL example.

Australia has 28M people and isn't part of any supranational union. Same with many other countries.

Why are Europeans so obsessed with this integration?

> "whatever Jarred feels like should be in there"

This is the main draw. Everything he implemented was fast and minimalist and he usually implements a standardized api (web apis, esbuild bundler api).

The opinionated stuff is usually very common sense.

Most of the libraries OC mentions are things you would just like to be as fast as possible above all else.

It's more "what one tool can do everything", not that its ideal. Like why people use Microsoft Teams even though its terrible.

The relational model and sql force us to simplify our data models too much by eliminating relationships or just not dealing with them.

Think about a nested json blob from some web service api and storing it in SQL in normalized tables. No one is going to do that. Everything just becomes a denormalized mess and everything is hacked around it.

Instead of modeling things in the proper way, most of the world's data is modeled in a way so that we don't have join explosions in sql queries because they look scary. Data pipelines become these scary batch transformations where data is dumped somewhere else without anyway to trace back where it came from.

I encounter so many end-user applications and systems where you wonder: "why couldn't they allow a list of items here instead of a single box" or "why can't this reference this other thing".

Political discussions for me are like programming. I enjoy them because I like finding bugs in people's logic like I do in programming.

I find a lot of people's political arguments wouldn't compile because of basic logic errors, and I try to point this out. But not many people are interested in this kind of analysis, they instead prefer the tribalist point-scoring like the OP mentions.

I dream of a world where political debates can be syntax-checked. I'm sure you could do it with AI today.

But in the end its all about feelings.

I can't describe how many times I will just go along with someone's passionate ranting on something I disagree with and egg them along because its makes them happy. This is tribalism. I will disagree with the group, and if you saw me you'd think I was the strongest supporter, but I actually vehemently disagree with everything.

There are very few people it's worth having a real discussion with these days.

I don't change my opinion of people for what they think, but it's very rare to find people who reciprocate this.

> to realize fundamentally different visions of the world, based on fundamentally different values

I think your use of the word "world" is telling.

Trump, the Republicans, and the global right are focused on their citizens.

The Democrats and the global left are more focused on the world and their role in it.

It's no longer just two approaches on how we can have the strongest economy. Each party has a weighting for how much to consider every issue across the world.

For example, there are people who would be happy with less growth, lower income, but more action on climate change.