I’m more than a little convinced ADHD isn’t really a disorder, society is the issue, and this personality/brain type is actually beneficial in simpler societies.
When it comes to neurodivergences that aren’t strictly universal negatives (for example: anyone would agree that DID is terrible, while modern autism advocacy strongly opposes any sort of “cure”, and even assimilation as opposed to integration), you can easily find the case that they work great as complements within larger groups. Having an autistic dude fascinated by working materials may result in your tribe being the very first one in the area that gets obsidian spears or composite bows, even if he isn’t a very good hunter otherwise.
The problem comes when an industrialized, profit-obsessed society attempts to standarize social customs, goods, living spaces and so on while individualizing responsibility for every aspect of your life despite plenty of its factors being outside any one person’s control. Perhaps you’d have a lot to contribute to society if you just had certain unusual accommodations, such as a very quiet house or freedom to set your own working hours, but companies in the contemporary market economy hisses at people who don’t fit like cogs in a machine, and having a house with very specific conditions is outside the reach of a lot of people. Perhaps you do even manage to find the means to become a very productive member of society despite the odds being stacked against you, but because the specificity of your situation means you barely have any negotiation power in the labor market, most of what you produce gets appropriated by someone who isn’t very smart, but has some capital and better “people skills”.
To an extent, it is also beneficial in today’s society. Hyperfocus and fast context switching can be assets in some jobs, if the downsides are not too great and that can depend on the job and colleagues a lot.
But yea, I can imagine it has been more of an asset in a different time.
Absolutely, most parts of neurodivergence is evolved to be useful for “wild” humans, hunter-gatherers. Like gee i sure wonder how it might be useful for people living in tents in the wildnerness to have a dude who just cannot go to sleep before 2 in the morning…
Apprently court jesters were historically generally autistic people, whom the rulers kept around because they wouldn’t sugarcoat stuff and acted like a bullshit detector. Might be pretty handy for a tribe to have some people who’ll speak up when they think the leader is being dumb.
That’s not how evolution works. Traits don’t evolve “to be useful”. Anyone who claims a goal to evolution has failed to grasp evolution.
Evolution converges on local maxima by selecting for traits that are good enough to continuously propagate through the filter of individuals death. For sexual reproduction, if a trait is not bad enough to continuously reduce carriers’ presence in a mating pool, it can and will remain.
As someone diagnosed with ADHD, I find many of these posts overly dramatic. I understand that dealing with it is challenging, but when I see others discussing it, I sometimes feel that some might not genuinely have ADHD and are merely exaggerating for attention.
pretty much the biggest inconvenience for me was getting people to write stuff down. Like when they’d try talk for five minutes about how they wanted something built, explicit instructions, I’d always have to remind them, write it down or draw it, if you want me to understand, we’ve been over this for years now, you know I know how to do the work once the desired result is presented in a way i can understand.
I was reading your study, and got to the part where they said it is hard to empirically test this theory because of limited genome whatever, and it crossed my mind Africans don’t carry the neanderthal DNA Europeans do, so i looked up if ADHD was more common in either race and it apparently is much more prevalent in white people. Yeah correlation isn’t causation but it is interesting.
I’m more than a little convinced ADHD isn’t really a disorder, society is the issue, and this personality/brain type is actually beneficial in simpler societies.
When it comes to neurodivergences that aren’t strictly universal negatives (for example: anyone would agree that DID is terrible, while modern autism advocacy strongly opposes any sort of “cure”, and even assimilation as opposed to integration), you can easily find the case that they work great as complements within larger groups. Having an autistic dude fascinated by working materials may result in your tribe being the very first one in the area that gets obsidian spears or composite bows, even if he isn’t a very good hunter otherwise.
The problem comes when an industrialized, profit-obsessed society attempts to standarize social customs, goods, living spaces and so on while individualizing responsibility for every aspect of your life despite plenty of its factors being outside any one person’s control. Perhaps you’d have a lot to contribute to society if you just had certain unusual accommodations, such as a very quiet house or freedom to set your own working hours, but companies in the contemporary market economy hisses at people who don’t fit like cogs in a machine, and having a house with very specific conditions is outside the reach of a lot of people. Perhaps you do even manage to find the means to become a very productive member of society despite the odds being stacked against you, but because the specificity of your situation means you barely have any negotiation power in the labor market, most of what you produce gets appropriated by someone who isn’t very smart, but has some capital and better “people skills”.
To an extent, it is also beneficial in today’s society. Hyperfocus and fast context switching can be assets in some jobs, if the downsides are not too great and that can depend on the job and colleagues a lot.
But yea, I can imagine it has been more of an asset in a different time.
Absolutely, most parts of neurodivergence is evolved to be useful for “wild” humans, hunter-gatherers. Like gee i sure wonder how it might be useful for people living in tents in the wildnerness to have a dude who just cannot go to sleep before 2 in the morning…
Apprently court jesters were historically generally autistic people, whom the rulers kept around because they wouldn’t sugarcoat stuff and acted like a bullshit detector. Might be pretty handy for a tribe to have some people who’ll speak up when they think the leader is being dumb.
That’s not how evolution works. Traits don’t evolve “to be useful”. Anyone who claims a goal to evolution has failed to grasp evolution.
Evolution converges on local maxima by selecting for traits that are good enough to continuously propagate through the filter of individuals death. For sexual reproduction, if a trait is not bad enough to continuously reduce carriers’ presence in a mating pool, it can and will remain.
It’s survival of not inadequate enough.
As someone diagnosed with ADHD, I find many of these posts overly dramatic. I understand that dealing with it is challenging, but when I see others discussing it, I sometimes feel that some might not genuinely have ADHD and are merely exaggerating for attention.
pretty much the biggest inconvenience for me was getting people to write stuff down. Like when they’d try talk for five minutes about how they wanted something built, explicit instructions, I’d always have to remind them, write it down or draw it, if you want me to understand, we’ve been over this for years now, you know I know how to do the work once the desired result is presented in a way i can understand.
You’re not alone in thinking that, and there are some studies which seem to agree.
I was reading your study, and got to the part where they said it is hard to empirically test this theory because of limited genome whatever, and it crossed my mind Africans don’t carry the neanderthal DNA Europeans do, so i looked up if ADHD was more common in either race and it apparently is much more prevalent in white people. Yeah correlation isn’t causation but it is interesting.