Thanks for this important digest. We've got to speak up in the face of the torrent os criticisms of Trump and his crew, many of which are blatantly self serving. Granted, there's a lot to be uncomfortable about a gaggle including many billionaires, for many of us have negative vibes about rich folk, in many cases unearned, but Trump's band are, I believe, genuinely committed to dismantling the corrupt administrative, largely by far, unelected apparatchiks.
RE: ADHD - As I understand it (might have picked this up from Scott Alexander), properly speaking there is no such disorder as ADHD. Before we even get into the awful social contagion stuff, at its core it's grasping at a variable human characteristic (focus/attention span) that, like most human characteristics, is more or less normally distributed, and then arbitrarily picking a point on the bell curve below which we label it a "disorder" in need of medication.
But this isn't what a disorder is. Contrast dwarfism with just being short. Dwarfism is a disorder. Or, properly speaking, it's a condition caused by one of several genetic disorders. Those disorders produce distinct results relative to just being short (e.g. unusual proportions), and they result in a much larger cluster of people on the far left tail of the height distribution than we would otherwise anticipate. Meanwhile we don't say that otherwise normal men more than 2 SD below the mean in height (~5'3") have Acute Shortness Disorder.
I don't think this by itself necessarily proves that ADHD drugs should never be used under any circumstances, but for me it was illuminating nonetheless.
Thank you for this fascinating and vaguely menacing discussion of Musk and his view of offspring.
Thanks for this important digest. We've got to speak up in the face of the torrent os criticisms of Trump and his crew, many of which are blatantly self serving. Granted, there's a lot to be uncomfortable about a gaggle including many billionaires, for many of us have negative vibes about rich folk, in many cases unearned, but Trump's band are, I believe, genuinely committed to dismantling the corrupt administrative, largely by far, unelected apparatchiks.
RE: ADHD - As I understand it (might have picked this up from Scott Alexander), properly speaking there is no such disorder as ADHD. Before we even get into the awful social contagion stuff, at its core it's grasping at a variable human characteristic (focus/attention span) that, like most human characteristics, is more or less normally distributed, and then arbitrarily picking a point on the bell curve below which we label it a "disorder" in need of medication.
But this isn't what a disorder is. Contrast dwarfism with just being short. Dwarfism is a disorder. Or, properly speaking, it's a condition caused by one of several genetic disorders. Those disorders produce distinct results relative to just being short (e.g. unusual proportions), and they result in a much larger cluster of people on the far left tail of the height distribution than we would otherwise anticipate. Meanwhile we don't say that otherwise normal men more than 2 SD below the mean in height (~5'3") have Acute Shortness Disorder.
I don't think this by itself necessarily proves that ADHD drugs should never be used under any circumstances, but for me it was illuminating nonetheless.