ADHD and PHD here. Somehow I survived and thrived. I think for us it’s important to know that we are extremely slow on one aspect which is reading/acquiring knowledge/editing drafts, but really fast at making connections, writing a first draft, coming up with new ideas. I’ve always felt my input bandwidth is like dial up, but the output is high speed glass fibre. You will meet many people that are the opposite in academia. Just don’t get frustrated when people pull past you at the start, you catch up later
I tend to not edit drafts as much anymore and just start over, more of a destructive iterative design approach. It makes it harder to plan projects and colleagues don't always like it but my output is high and I tend to be really good at cutting off things early that won't work. Do you feel similarly?
> I tend to be really good at cutting off things early that won't work.
I tend to be bad at this because "this isn't working" becomes "oh interesting, this isn't working".
Fwiw, very rarely does that not lead to value. Its just that the value add can be later down the line or in a different project. But so often there's that "Ahha!" or "oh it's just like that" moments. But I think a lot of people have difficulties with long term rewards. I think it's good to have both though but I'm not sure any single person is good at both so you need both types of people. Different optimizers for different goals
Totally it’s all about the kind games, trying to frame every paragraph, sentence or even word as a first draft. Don’t need to wipe an entire document imho.
I'm not so sure the knowledge acquisition is slower. I'm actually starting to believe it's faster. What my other ADHD friend and I notice is the threshold for thinking you get it is lower. I'm not sure I'll ever fully understand any single thing but I do have a lot of peers which will say yes far earlier and it leads to a lot of confusing experiences.
A common experience we have is that we'll be trying to figure something out then go talk to a larger group or find someone who should understand the thing (e.g. highly relevant publications) and then either "huh, I never thought about that" or they try to answer a different question (I understand they are trying to be helpful but I'd rather "I don't know". It's academia, the whole point is we don't know lol).
Though in other things I fully agree. I'm always slower in "speed to first result" but often that's because I'll write code from scratch, make sure I really understand, and make sure its flexible because I know I'm going to be hacking on it a lot. Others are often forking repos doing a lot of gluing and all that. (When I do that I feel very lost and like I understand nothing). But my experiments end up being more complete and I'm able to answer more questions where someone else would say that's too much work.
I think academia needs both types of people btw. I'm not trying to say I'm better it's just different. There's different advantages. My issue is that the system strongly optimizes for one and not the other. I think the biggest flaw in academia is thinking we know what's a successful line of research and what isn't (along with what's novel, especially post hoc lol). All the evidence seems against this and the high frequency of dark horses suggests it'd be idiotic to rely on predictions to be highly accurate.
I too think knowledge acquisition is faster - much faster - but that's only when I can actually get myself to sit down and focus. Depending on some magic combination of my mood, feeling of purpose, and phases of the moon, I can blow through a thick spec book in one long session and remember both tons of little trivia and grok the principles behind the design, all in one pass - or, I'll get sleepy after the third sentence, take an involuntary nap halfway through the first page, and overall maybe read a dozen pages before giving up, and not remembering much of if later.
I had this experience several times at work - I had to deal with some obscure legacy tech (think industrial protocols from the 90s), I enthusiastically figured I can learn this quickly, sat down to reference material, and... my eyes stopped being able to process text. And yet, over the following weeks or months, I'd have moments trying to work with that old thing, where I'd suddenly find a rabbit hole I had to chase, and through that chase I'd get rapidly up to speed with the spec that was impossible to even look at earlier.
Long term, this added to a much deeper understanding than people around me had, for fraction of the effort - so this was a win. Unfortunately, this also isn't compatible with how everyone works, as I can't plan or give other people promises or estimates around this. "I'll get there when I get there" doesn't fly in the modern workplace.
Like a few other related aspects of ADHD, it really is a superpower - just very hard to activate, and trying to activate it on demand actually makes it impossible.
What makes me sad though is that it seems this is not how it used to be. In fact from what I can tell it was more common in high innovation labs to select these types of people and kinda let them loose. The job wasn't so much to tell them what to work on so much as make sure there aren't things blocking them and to make sure they don't get stuck in the rabbit holes. Of course it was never all sunshine and roses, but it did seem that the environments were a lot more flexible. Even several recent Veritasium videos have talked about people who just essentially didn't do their actual job for like a year, "slacking off", and how this gave them the opportunities to explore certain ideas.
I really think we have to admit how many dark horses there are when it comes to innovation. If we don't provide space for them, then we slow progress down. If we don't create an environment, then it slows. Do we really want to go back to the time where most science was performed by the wealthy? Because only they were the ones who had the luxury of being able to explore?
I often think back to Asimov's "Profession"[0]. I can't help but think this in part was a critique on academia and the relationship to this issue.
This is the best article I've read on programming in a while. When I code all I do is work on one object or one function at a time. Working usually on the end result. The key here is to develop a quick and easy solution without too many issues. This is also the difference between new and experienced developers. Experienced developers have less fluid intelligence so build reliable simple programs.
Honestly there is so much more to North America than just Maya for decennia's. You can review the indigenous people territories back centuries ago. There are some really good organizations that are tracking this.
Getting thrown into the deep end is awesome. This is a great opportunity to apply things you can learn. Keep studying and reading, ultimately solving problems even not perfectly you will learn a lot.
After clicking on the surprise me button 20 times or so, a few things popped out to me.
1) I remember this time, we had delightfully nerdy hobbies back then. Little side projects and no one really cared how it was presented. It reminds me of my Southpark website that I maintained with each episode a summary and some screenshots. I spend quite a bit time on it, with my little counter hitting 1,000 views at some point(maybe I was half of that).
2) the web was not created for mobile. Everything is pretty awful, and not accessible. Reader view is not functional and it hinders absorbing the knowledge from these pages.
But I do feel there was a larger diversity, maybe I’m too locked in to social media and Google.
While I do not dream of this man, I found it fascinating. I don’t know how I’d come across this now. Even more interesting to me is what happens when you get rid of the oldsite part of the url… the new site is so much worse! General blog like template, theoretically more mobile friendly except way less visually attractive and interesting.
Indeed. Sites were sites, and someone's personality (and perhaps designer limitations) showed on it. I think with blogging things changed, people saw more opportunity to become an authority on topics rather than just putting their stuff 'out there' for fun.
And afterwards, the web became horribly centralised.
Surely the most used because of its affordablity and easy access. Coffee, energy drinks, tea, caffiene pills, etc.
I wonder what academia would look like if adderall, vyvanse, modafinil were just as accessible, or even less controlled substances that are considered to enhance mental performance like L-tyrosine, alpha-GPC, Lion's Mane mushroom, Bacopa, or Ginko.
In the article they said that there goal is to raise it from $20 to $44 so there’s your number. Honestly, I can’t use it for work because of the privacy and confidentiality concerns we have with the prompts.
OpenAI showed the way that AI is great. But, they will also need to improve their service. I don’t know how much time they have until other players come in to eat their lunch. Apples new features look great and run on device. There is also such much time before open source models do 90% of what OpenAI does and run on device. Facebook is giving it away for free. If profitability is going to be achieved in 2029? That’s five years for players(Apple/fb/microsoft) that are making money today to run and catch up.
There is also the fact it’s much easier to write something when you know where you are going. When you start you often just make lots of items general in nature to improve later on.
Honestly SQLite is just a great option. Stored locally, so you have that fast disk access. Does great for small medium and even larger databases. And you just have a file.
