> Sure would be fucking nice if they (democrats and republicans) could not have to take opposing sides on fucking everything
There is a selection bias in the issues you speak of. Non-polarizing topics are handled swiftly, without much attention from the public spotlight. There is no point in discussing what's already agreed upon, and that's one of the more reasonable justifications of political polarization.
That said, the polarization is greater than would be optimal, so I do agree - it would be nice.
When reading this post, I almost expected the writer to turn things around and make a realization of this sort. No hard feelings on my part though - just a sense of anticipation at work.
Watts doesn't deny the differences between those affected by ADHD and those who are not. He argues that these differences are best understood as personality traits and not products of an affliction.
This isn't a matter of ignorance, but interpretation of and reaction to scientific discoveries.
There is no success because of ADHD. There is success despite having ADHD.
It's not a personality trait that I cannot physically do something I want to do and need to do without medication and, frankly, I'm sick of people who don't experience it offering new theories on it as if they have some grand insight into it.
Get a head injury that breaks your executive functions. Join us. Then try to offer it up as a personality trait.
Love a lot of your posts here you're very vocal and well explain. I'm an ADHDer, software developer, avid researcher, fascinated with neuroscience and cognitive science and studied modules of it in university. But I sense you've been reading a lot from Barkley? And Barkley unfortunately can be closed minded(his brother had ADHD and died in a car crash so it's understandable he's negative towards it).
We've seen in neuroscience that certain characteristics in ADHD, i.e lack of inhibition can lead to positives. The brain compensates.
Honestly, I feel in the next decade ADHD will be looked upon as a subset of personality/neurological traits, more in line with how as Aspergers is been seen nowadays.
I'm not a fan of the perspective from which this article is written. Where the author writes "X is affected by ADHD", I'm inclined toward "X has a short attention span", or "X is hyperactive".
The same perspective is taken by "victims" of ADHD, parents, and members of the media alike. I think we'd all be better off if we stopped speaking of these conditions as external forces acting upon the self, and instead, as mutable characteristics of the self.
I don't have a short attention span and I'm not hyperactive. I spend a lot of time thinking about things. I deduce things noticeably faster than my peers as long as it's not socially related. I have intense focus as long as something remains stimulating. When things lose my interest or are pointless they become tedious and it's not about attention span. I cannot stop worrying about assigned tasks to the point of anxiety. There is a mental barrier and I cannot work on the task despite intentions and efforts to do so. Medications don't really help me. They do at first, then they become less effective. An interesting side note about meds: The first time on meds I finally could see social cues and body language. It was a whole new world. I still see them off the meds now that I know about them but I may have trouble understanding what they mean due to lack of experience in receiving those signals. Getting proper sleep, nutrition, and having regular, serious exercise help more than meds. The affliction is very real. Just because you can't see it or refuse to believe in it doesn't change the fact that it impacts the lives of others.
Something to think about: it's possible you have more than one named disorder (though they could be related in chemistry). When I first started ADHD meds I had a similar reaction as you, though I wound up in actual panic attacks from the anxiety. When I treated the anxiety with an ultra-low dose then everything came out perfect.
I've since stopped the anxiety med and feel I've trained myself a little more on how to handle it. I have my moments but have the skills I need now to recognize those moments and bring myself down. Luckily one can do that with mild anxiety, unlike ADHD...
The biggest non-medicinal benefits are absolutely sleep, nutrition, and exercise -- you're right. Without a good foundation, nothing can be built.
> "I don't have a short attention span and I'm not hyperactive"
I thought these were the defining characteristics of ADHD? I'm sorry, please forgive my lack of familiarity.
> "When things lose my interest or are pointless they become tedious"...
I don't understand how this is considered a symptom of anything. To me, this is entirely normal. Things that you aren't interested in should be tedious. The mental barrier you speak of is internal honesty - you don't find importance or interest in X, and consequently, motivation doesn't emerge.
You speak with the world view of a neurotypical human. I'm happy for you.
For the perspective of the broken toys in the box, let me explain. :)
When an NT is asked to do a boring, repetitive task, he'll do it for eight hours and then get drunk afterwards to recover. Good job.
When an ADHD-afflicted individual is asked to do a boring, repetitive task, he'll do it for about five minutes and then spend eight hours trying to find a way to not do it again. Or stare at the wall. Or berate himself for not working. Or rack up a disabling level of anxiety because he's not working.
You present this as something everyone does, and you're right to. The disorder comes in when someone cannot do it. Not that the person will not muster some internal whatever to push on, but that the person's brain is physically incapable of doing it. The same kind of incapable as a major depressive being incapable of talking himself out of an anxiety-induced depression.
When it's a disorder, it's a disorder. The problem is that so many people see the high numbers of people being diagnosed and write it off as a fad. It's not. Maybe the numbers are high and some are being misdiagnosed, or maybe we're learning about all the edge cases. I don't know. I do know it exists and it's an impairment and it goes well beyond basic motivation.
I've had "do it or you're fired" moments where THAT wasn't enough to motivate me, and I had a very real fear of being unemployed.
First of all, thank you for this in-depth response. It beats the hell out of anonymous and explanation-less downvotes.
I had never come across the word neurotypical before your comment and now, after reading the corresponding wikipedia page, I am aware that it does characterize me (i.e. "anyone who does not have autism, dyslexia, developmental coordination disorder, bipolar disorder, ADD/ADHD, or other similar conditions").
For the majority of elementary, middle, and secondary school, I fit your anecdote pretty well, minus the getting drunk part (I was young, sheltered, and without access to or interest in alcohol).
However, after sophomore year or so, I realized how much time I had wasted pushing through boring, repetitive tasks, and I grew incapable of completing assignments. This turning point left me in the position of ADHD-afflicted individuals for the final two years of high school. Call it burnout, early senioritous, or whatever - the symptoms were the same. With fear of college app rejections as my motivation (like your fear of unemployment), I couldn't bring myself to do mandatory, largely weighted assignments. They were just too boring, meaningless. Somehow I remained motivated up until then. I really don't know how, to be honest.
Out of curiosity, how would you say my realization [and subsequent drop-off in academic performance] relate to ADHD and NT?
On another note, are A
DHD-afflicted individuals literally incapable of mustering the "internal whatever" you speak of? Is the ability to conjure motivation entirely absent? It's really hard to compare similarly subjective abilities, like pain thresholds and the like.
Even if this incapability is just that: a true incapability, I'm not certain that portrayal of ADHD as an affliction is a net-benefit. It seems better for people to believe in their own capabilities, even when many are literally incapable, as you say. Similarly, the belief in free will is good for people and society - even if free will is obviously nonexistent. Determinism yields higher rates of depression and discourages self-responsibility.
The Diagnosis of ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) has been folded into ADHD as a subtype Attention Deficit HyperActivity Disorder- Primarily Inattentive.
It is a symptom when normal people even if they are disinterested in a task can still summon the level of focus needed to effectively complete a task. That is a much harder proposition for someone with an attention deficit syndrome condition.
I'm not saying it doesn't exist. I'm suggesting that it be considered a characteristic, and not an external force. This way, we don't grow dualistic, differentiating between oneself and one's brain.
I guess it's the dualism here that I'm criticizing, not ADHD itself. See the fourth paragraph:
"if you have the 'illness,' the real problem is that, to your brain, the world that you live in essentially feels not very interesting."
This distinction between "you" and "your brain" is what bothers me.
I think the way it has to be explained is that, sometimes I'll read a book but my phone will be there. Just near me so I'll tap the on button, no notifications, back to reading. Tap the on button. Read. I didn't check the time. What time is it? Tap the on button. Ignore the time. Read. Turn the on button. I can never just read. Its fun but not exciting.
No, not at all. It's the other way around, really. Those who don't use Meteor for their projects may not be able to without trashing existing codebases.
What I'm hearing is that Meteor doesn't play well with others and that you should make the decision to go with Meteor carefully since changing your mind later will require a ground-up refactor.
This is pretty much my experience as someone who started working on a project where the lead dev had decided to use Meteor and then quit leaving a wonky prototype with "reactive data", poor performance and missing functionality.
Now, some would say "it's not Meteors fault the UI wasn't made well!" and then I'd reply "sure, but if Meteor didn't encourage (and it seems, require) tight coupling of the data access and presentation layers, then maybe we wouldn't have spent the last 3 weeks rebuilding the entire app from the ground up just to add some missing functionality and fix UI bugs".
Honestly, I really can't figure out the lack criticism I see of Meteor around here. All these comments to congratulate on an arbitrary step in version number? I see other articles of accomplishment with a fraction of the positive encouragement and many times the criticisms. Is there a silent majority, or did I spend the last few months being underwhelmed by Meteor because I'm missing something?
Meteor embodies, for me, a tool that makes things 'easy', rather than one that makes things 'simple'.
Meteor does make things easier, by making things simpler.
It is much simpler dealing with Meteor's API's then working with documentation from 3 or 4 different frameworks that you need to accomplish the same kind of stuff Meteor does.
Meteor gives you a set of clean coherent APIS to work with to get stuff done.
A lot of criticism of "new shiny tech" gets downvoted/flagged on HN so people don't even bother anymore, while another useless library in Go/Javascript gets pushed to the top of the front page.
At this point, what percentage of web development can't/shouldn't be done with Meteor? It seems like everything else is obsolete in comparison. The only non-Meteor cases I can think of involve especially large scale.
Because Meteor hides much of what's really going on, it's sometimes hard to understand just how the app is working. At least that was my impression of it when I tried it about 9 months ago.
Choosing a stack on your own means more time is spent making things work, but then you know how it works. That's why I went for a MEAN stack instead of Meteor. But I'm going to try Meteor again soon!
While Meteor does do a lot for you out of the box, it doesn't really prevent you from seeing what's going on. There are some good resources for seeing what Meteor is doing behind the scenes (meteorhacks.com and eventedmind.com) if one does want to dig in.
Even at "especially large scale" there are things that can be done to support unique scale cases, including swapping out database drivers and other components that don't work as well as you might need.
Although this may be corrected in 1.0, single page applications in Javascript like this (whether in Angular or other tools) tend to underperform in SEO (Or not perform at all). Meteor has a sort of hack that handles SEO at the moment, but it's not particularly terrific.
Meteor's database support is presently focused on MongoDB exclusively. Expect relational and other data stores to have improved support in the near future. If you were starting a project that depended on a relational database (Postgres, MySQL, MS SQL, Oracle, etc.), Meteor would probably be a poor choice today. For many use cases, however, Meteor is terrific in my experience.
Basically, if you need native MySQL support (some support already exists, but it's not in core), or if you need a web-site (SEO), not web-app.
Regarding scalability, by the time your app becomes so popular to exceed thousands of concurrent users, Meteor will have improved scalability again. They've done it a few times already with Mongo oplog tailing support and whatnot. If you already have a highly popular app, it will take you time to port it to Meteor too. So scalability may seem like a problem right now, but likely won't be one in, say, half a year.
Because gob encodings begin with type specifiers, all objects of the same type number are grouped together. That's the only guarantee made across all types.
For strings and numeric arrays, lexicographic order is maintained, yes. But be careful with structs and other types - I'm not sure about those yet, or of gob's byte ordering can be depended on.
I'm implementing for-each-of-type iteration right now, and for stringified keys, this iteration will function will be lexicographic.
There is a selection bias in the issues you speak of. Non-polarizing topics are handled swiftly, without much attention from the public spotlight. There is no point in discussing what's already agreed upon, and that's one of the more reasonable justifications of political polarization.
That said, the polarization is greater than would be optimal, so I do agree - it would be nice.