Well, it's well known that ADD/ADHD aren't about lack of focus, but about an inability to direct one's focus to where it's needed.
Normal people can think "I need X, let's work on X" but ADHD people are at the mercy of what's "chosen for them" by their brain.
This was probably fine 4000 years ago, when the world was looser, and people could find their place in life regardless of their particular quirks, but not so much nowadays.
This difficulty or inability to direct focus can be "trained away" with enough effort, but it isn't easy at all.
Recent research suggests the opposite: ADHD made for better hunters which was a valuable asset to the rest of the group.
And even later on, community life, with fewer distractions, less sedentary boredom (like in a modern office job) and fewer demands for precise timing and continuous focus, also made it easier. Even school either didn't exist or was a much loser affair than the institution we know for the past 2 centuries.
I'd prepare for winter 10x more easily than focus on some boring ass corporate task in a world filled with bullshit distractions and endless structured and strict time demands. And I'd have an extended family plus community to help with things.
Consider how people think it's rude if you're somewhat late on a rendezvous or meeting etc. Then consider how clocks and precise timekeeping weren't a thing for most of history, nor was reliable transit, cars, roads, and stuff. You got there, when you got there - even today in more rural countries.
I think that's offset by our ability to operate effectively "under fire". My lack of ability to direct attention is mostly a factor of modern convenience and work structure I think. Being assigned a presentation to deliver on architecture changes in two weeks doesn't really have the same stakes as being a hunter gatherer. I know most of what I have to do to earn money is bullshit at some level and that certainly adds to my inability to focus on it. But when things are crashing, the server is on fire and everyone is panicking, I'm at my most comfortable. There is a real and direct need and I can handle those situations better than most people based on my 20+ years doing this sort of work. It's when everything is humming along smoothly that I'm least productive.
I also believe it to have been easier with ADHD in the distant past. My reasoning is that in a small, but tighter group there will be others who can compensate for the ADHD person's executive function deficiencies. But the ADHD person might bring enough of a benefit by occasionally going down rabbit holes or discovering stuff that's off the beaten track that the group will still tolerate them.
I forget where (and I really ought find it again) but I recall some linking of ADHD as simply the kind of traits that are necessary for survival -esque scenarios.
I know that I don't feel as awkward and weird when I'm in nature or building huts or what have you. Seeing the abundance of what nature has to offer and the possibilities actually feels far better than being in a concrete building and being forced to walk ONLY in designated walking areas.
My ADHD always feels the worse when I realize that I have to abide by _insert_arbitrary_deadline_here.
> My ADHD always feels the worse when I realize that I have to abide by _insert_arbitrary_deadline_here.
Similar here. For me, if I'm given some arbitrary deadline in the future, it almost guarantees I'm not going to do the thing until the day before, or depending on the task, hours before it's due.
"Hey webguy, we need this report by the end of next week" means I'm not doing it until Friday afternoon, and I have no control over it. Doesn't matter if I try to work on it earlier, just won't happen.
It's having an interest based nervous system. We crave novelty, urgency, interest, and challenge to do anything.
While I don't dispute the biological aspects of life with ADHD, I also cannot escape the reality of bullshit timelines.
My essence knows, without a shadow of a doubt, that time is cyclical. And just because some person or org says, randomly today, that something NEEDS TO BE COMPLETED by next Thursday or the world ends, doesn't actually change the nature of time.
There have been countless things in life where, as a civilization, we simply allow for trivial shit like this to have actual, life altering consequences. I think we're dumb.
> This was probably fine 4000 years ago, when the world was looser, and people could find their place in life regardless of their particular quirks, but not so much nowadays.
Is this likely? My overgeneralizing gut feel would be that more people who would have traits which might be perceived as unusual and impede survivability 4000 years ago would be more likely to receive a chance to live a regular lifespan in most today‘s societies.
Increased thrill seeking activity includes sex. The evolutional advantage could simply be more chance of passing on genes; from that point on it doesn’t matter if you fail at life, get outcast from society and/or die young.
Today we're much much more about conformity, rigid structrures, time management, and so on, than 4000 years ago, or even 50 and 100 years ago.
And today we're much less about having extended families and communities that take care of their members and lend a hand.
At best we have some half-arsed provisions by an indifferent state, and we're left on our own. A slip and you're broke, or homeless, or depressed on your own.
It's only in the past few hundred years where focus actually matters: knowledge workers, and some factory work where lack of attention resulted in injury.
To be fair, that's what people mean when they say "lack of focus" too.
They don't mean "this person can't focus on anything", but "they can't focus on their school projects, their work" etc. They don't care if "but hey, I can hyperfocus for months on the history of late Roman battles or throat singing techniques".
I've read about the fast inverse square root trick, but it didn't occur to me that it can be used for other formulas or operations. Is this a common trick in DSP/GPU-like architectures nowadays?
And what's the mathematical basis? (that is, is this technique formalized anywhere?)
It seems insane to me that you run Newton's algorithm straight on the IEEE 754 format bits and it works, what with the exponent in excess coding and so on
1/sqrt(x) is complicated. Imagine instead of computing 1/sqrt(x), imagine instead that you wanted to compute exp_2(-.5 log_2(x)). Also imagine you have an ultra fast way to compute exp_2 and log_2. If you have an ultra fast way to compute exp_2 and log_2, then exp_2(-.5 log_2(x)) is gonna be fast to compute.
It turns out you do have an ultra fast way to compute log_2: you bitcast a float to an integer, and then twiddle some bits. The first 8 bits (after the sign bit, which is obviously zero because we're assuming our input is positive) or whatever are the exponent, and the trailing 23 bits are a linear interpolation between 2^n and 2^(n+1) or whatever. exp_2 is the same but in reverse.
You can simply convert the integer to floating point, multiply by -.5, then convert back to integer. But multiplying -.5 by x can be applied to a floating point operating directly on its bits, but it's more complicated. You'll need to do some arithmetic, and some magic numbers.
So you're bitcasting to an integer, twiddling some bits, twiddling some bits, twiddling some bits, twiddling some bits, and bitcasting to a float. It turns out that all the bit twiddling simplifies if you do all the legwork, but that's beyond the scope of this post.
So there you go. You've computed exp_2(-.5 log_2 x). You're done. Now you need to figure out how to apply that knowledge to the inverse square root.
It just so happens that 1/sqrt(x) and exp(-.5 log x) are the same function. exp(-.5 log x) = exp(log(x^-.5)) = x^-.5 = 1/sqrt(x).
Any function where the hard parts are computing log_2 or exp_2 can be accelerated this way. For instance, x^y is just exp_2(y log_2 x).
Note that in fast inverse square root, you're not doing Newton's method on the integer part, you're doing it on the floating point part. Newton's method doesn't need to be done at all, it just makes the final result more accurate.
You can use the same techniques as fast inverse sqrt anywhere logs are useful. It's not particularly common these days because it's slower than a dedicated instruction and there are few situations where the application is both bottlenecked by numerical code and is willing to tolerate the accuracy issues. A pretty good writeup on how fast inverse sqrt works was done here:
https://github.com/francisrstokes/githublog/blob/main/2024%2...
A lot of old-school algorithms like CORDIC went the same way.
There's a related technique to compute exponentials with FMA that's somewhat more useful in ML (e.g. softmax), but it has similar precision issues and activation functions are so fast relative to matmul that it's not usually worth it.
For all that it sounds unlikely, it'd be nice if the blogosphere, with blog replies and pingbacks, could come back for this sort of discussion. No monetization, though, so substack and co. are out.
What, in your opinion, is wrong with a bit of monetization?
I know it can produce some posts of less value, but it also pulls the blogger back in and allows professionals in certain areas to not feel they give put high quality out there for absolutely nothing.
I just mean, I can see the pros, but not really serious cons, so I'm wondering what your take is?
My worry with processed food is that precise manufacture opens up the doors to producing all sorts of foods with an unhealthy imbalance of components. Specifically, that the unnatural surplus of, say, hydrogenated oils or high fructose corn syrup, or whatever, is something that will have disastrous nth order consequences we can't predict, so it looks promising in the short term and corporations looking to maximize their profit will all doubtlessly do more of this.
I only have slightly more than a passing interest in food science and nutrition, but from all I've learned my gut feeling is that I ought to avoid this stuff, and rely on cooking my own food as much as possible so I don't get into any imbalances (it's very hard to get a surplus of any macro or any other component via "natural" products)
I don't have any evidence on the nutrition side, but it's certainly not an experiment I'd like to do with my only body.
And in the psychological side, it's definitely something to avoid if we value our physical and mental health
Can you explain how ADHD and things being hard in the way you describe are connected? I don't see the connection, but if it's the case, I should go see a doctor...
At a very high level, the answer is Dopamine. Normal peoples brains have a ready supply of it available and their brains generate some in preparation for doing a task and then continue to generate more as they keep working on things, this is the task positive reward loop keeping the brain focused. For people with adhd, this entire feedback loop is more or less fucked. You don’t get dopamine as you start a task, you don’t get it when you persist with a task, and you don’t get it when you complete a task. So getting things done basically provides no reward, as a result all you get is the negatives from doing the thing, it tires you out and depletes the dopamine reserves you do have available.
That's interesting, because I checked out everything2 last year to see what I had missed out on, and found it a nice place with poetry and personal essays. Maybe at some point their culture changed again?
It's entirely possible! I left sometime in the mid 2000s, so there's certainly a lot of time for cultures to have changed significantly even multiple times.
> Maybe at some point their culture changed again?
Supposedly Tumblr has done the same. They crashed and burned so hard that they actually came out of the ordeal with a reverse eternal September effect, where miraculously most people act respectfully towards each other and are not just trying to exploit the platform.
For both of your cases, the "25 to 30 minutes task" trick won't work at all. For a case that persists for years, what I've learned is that it's either real ADHD, or some emotional problem around the topic. For me, it was 100% an emotional problem, though I do have a bit of a scattered mind, but I can focus it, whereas I've seen people with serious ADHD who can't do it at all and need meds (among other things).
For example, having many interests is fine, but when it comes to choice, what keeps you stuck can be something like a complete fear of regretting the choice. Words like lazyness or perfectionism are usually the sheep's clothing that the wolf (emotion) is wearing. How can some organizational trick from a blog post help here?
I've read lots of self-help books (among other things) when I faced these issues a few years ago, and there's a curious commonality: it's all small tricks developed for the author's personal experience. But what I've noticed is that there are two kinds of people in these situations: the ones who don't a solution and get out of the problem (which is the group that happens to include most of those authors), and the ones who stay stuck looking for an answer, a quick solution, a trick to escape.
The first type can get out by using something like the GTD book. That means their problem really was that they lacked some crucial bit of organizational knowledge to unlock their path towards whatever they want to do.
But the latter type (the ones who're stuck in the cycle) need to let something go rather than accumulate new things (in this case, tips and tricks about Getting Things Done).
There's the DIY path (hard, involves journaling, introspection, noticing and categorizing your emotions, reading Jung, reading ancient texts like the Bhagavad Gita) and the psychologist path (you need to find a good paychologist who doesn't just ask "and what do you feel about it?" over and over but actually takes an active role in your situation and your circumstances)
> For both of your cases, the "25 to 30 minutes task" trick won't work at all. For a case that persists for years, what I've learned is that it's either real ADHD, or some emotional problem around the topic. For me, it was 100% an emotional problem, though I do have a bit of a scattered mind, but I can focus it, whereas I've seen people with serious ADHD who can't do it at all and need meds (among other things).
I'm not so sure about that. Mind you, I had already been thinking that putting some effort in limited amount of time instead of doing nothing at all before reading the article, so if anything the latter gave me some more confidence that it's actually a solution that at least worked for someone
> But the latter type (the ones who're stuck in the cycle) need to let something go rather than accumulate new things (in this case, tips and tricks about Getting Things Done).
On that front, I thing you're perfectly right.
> There's the DIY path (hard, involves journaling, introspection, noticing and categorizing your emotions, reading Jung, reading ancient texts like the Bhagavad Gita) and the psychologist path (you need to find a good paychologist who doesn't just ask "and what do you feel about it?" over and over but actually takes an active role in your situation and your circumstances)
Admittedly I don't feel 100% sure that what you just wrote doesn't apply to me, so would you mind expanding a bit more on the details?
Why would procrastination in a case like mine be linked to emotional issue? Actually even better, was it that for you? In which way did this link exist, and how did you find out? How did you managed to solve it, if you solved it at all?
(there's a typo in my post: "the ones who don't a solution and get out of the problem" ought to be "the ones who find a solution and get out of the problem")
> I'm not so sure about that. Mind you, I had already been thinking that putting some effort in limited amount of time instead of doing nothing at all before reading the article, so if anything the latter gave me some more confidence that it's actually a solution that at least worked for someone
Yes, absolutely, but for the kind of people I'm talking about, it's like telling an overweight person to "just go to the gym, bro". It works, yeah, but there's some who do buckle up and go to the gym, and there's others who stay stuck in a cycle and don't take any steps out even thought from the outside, what they have to do is obvious (for example, some cope with stress or anxiety by eating. How can they become healthier without tackling the root of the issue, which is the source of the stress/anxiety? This is what I mean by things having emotional causes)
For ADHD, you needn't look too far. There's a top comment in this thread about someone who spent 40 years with these issues until they got actual help. Once the root is identified (diagnosed) then the difficulty in dealing with the problem goes down.
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> Actually even better, was it that for you?
It's good that you ask this, because I don't know your situation. As for me, I basically tried to exhaust the possibilities by reading self help books, then moving into philosophy (mostly eastern) and then moving into psychology (via Jung's books, and Alok Kanojia's youtube videos). No tip or trick helped me, and intellectually, I knew what the right answer was all along (an equivalent of "just go to the gym"). But that still didn't translate to action, which surprised me. In the end, I was forced to leave my overly intellectual/rational view of the world, and delve into what Jung called Eros, a contrast of Logos. But don't be distracted by the name. Perhaps it's better to talk about "intelligence quotient" (IQ) and "emotional quotient" (EQ). My underdeveloped EQ was causing me quite a bit of problems, because I wasn't aware of my emotions, of what I was feeling, of why I moved towards some things and not towards others. EQ is related to motivation, among other things. That's where what I wrote in the DIY path comes in. It took me a year of work. And it taught me a very interesting meta-lesson: I noticed in hindsight the amount of effort that I had put into this problem. It made me feel so desperate that I spent hours and hours going through books, taking notes every day, and learning a lot. But for the areas that really mattered to me, I had been led away. The lesson is that the more intellectually important something is to me, the harder it becomes to deal with it. This can manifest as perfectionisn. For example, I don't care at all about how my books are arranged in my bookshelf. So I place them as they fit. But if I care a lot about organization, I may keep them in boxes for years while I fret over the best way to implement the Dewey system for my 1000+ books and also planning (but not writing!) an app to scan my books into a local database and so on.
(What do I mean by "intellectually important"? It's whatever we aren't led to by our emotions yet still matters to us. When I was led by the emotion of despair, I studied ceaselessly to get rid of it. But when I think about wanting to do something without a strong emotion backing it, it's harder to jump into it without forcing yourself)
So I care about a lot of things, and I care a lot. Also, I want to work on everything.
So my inaction here was because I was scared of the possibility of letting go of the others if I dedicate myself to a few things, and truly focused on them, devoting my time and energy to that endeavour.
That's what annoyed me when I saw others, who spent years on making their passion project (whether a game, a set of paintings, a program or a tool to help others, a web novel they self-published, or whatever else)... And I knew what I had to do. Do what they did but for what I care about, for my ideas that I feel so strongly about. And I wasn't doing it. It's fucking annoying, like trying to lift your hand (which you know works perfectly) but you can't.
As for your case, only you can find out. The first link that therapists will try to find inside you is trauma, because that kind of stuff has far-reaching consequences on everything in your life, including motivation. But it's not always trauma, so don't think that there must have been something suppressed inside you or whatever.
For example, I had a lot of problems from having been a "gifted kid", being treated like I'm super smart and whatnot. That pushed me away from hard work and from things that weren't immediately easy, and that a big root cause. But it wasn't a trauma of any kind - I had a normal childhood
About my progress... I'm working on it and getting much better. I recently passed a big exam, and I'm honing some of my skills, putting in the hard work.
Yeah, practical hermeneutics involve a healthy sprinkle of our reality into those texts.
And it makes sense that modern problems aren't well treated by sutras or vedic texts. Deadlines are ever shortening, everything is vying for our attention.
A project that we're very attached to because the failure of delivering means you could get sacked (usually, our minds jump straight to the worst case: we WILL get sacked) is probably something unheard of in the times of the Buddha. But it's just hard-mode life compared to what they wrote. The patterns are the same, but you have less HP, and you're full of debuffs.
Under that lens, those texts are mostly timeless and independent of which era you read it on. If you understand that you're working on a team, that your agency is only one part of the success. There's all sort of factors that go into the success or failure of the project, and all you can do is the work you've been assigned to. That's where you can care and do the best work that you can while still being dispassionate about the project's success or failure, and thus less affected by the pressures of the deadlines, less stressed by the pressures from the higher ups, the estimates you know are completely wrong, etc.
Of course, all of this is assuming you're working on the kind of project I'm imagining, but it should apply to other things too
I don't know if that's a smart way to bypass pesky hidden information negotiations and suss out other party's upper bound or a really stupid way to do business...
Of course, I'd rather have 20K per customer
But an initial quote of 300K would likely lead to many instant rejections rather than engaging in negotiation, right? That's why I say it feels like a stupid practice, even though it could pay off really well if some company accepts outright (With the caveat that I've never been near this kind of business deal, so I'm just going off of common sense)
Normal people can think "I need X, let's work on X" but ADHD people are at the mercy of what's "chosen for them" by their brain.
This was probably fine 4000 years ago, when the world was looser, and people could find their place in life regardless of their particular quirks, but not so much nowadays.
This difficulty or inability to direct focus can be "trained away" with enough effort, but it isn't easy at all.