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PaperclipPerfector
2mo ago
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Notes -
https://pelorus.substack.com/p/priors-for-cognitive-enhancement
Is one of the most interesting pieces of writing I have recently come across. It introduced me to a model that I would roughly describe as
(Net X)[Or Net X complement] = Apparent X - Complement of XI would strongly suggest reading the entire article before deeming the model too simple and obvious.
It's going to take a while for the model to fully settle in for me, but I already see applications all over the place.
I think one of the features of why so many people described Scott's early work and others from the rationalist sphere as "insight porn" was because of this property. Putting a name and formalizing something that for most people was previously only encoded in gut feelings. And I don't think there are any Academic fields other than perhaps Philosophy that are making general fuzzy models of the world (models that also work with the rules and confines of socially constructed domains).
I think I am very high focus and moderate divergence. Net is somewhat mildly unfocused. This might explain why depending on the task and context, I can vary between being perceived as having ADHD, being autistic, or being scatterbrained.
My ADHD is mild, as in I could convince others (including my parents and tutors) that I was a perfectly normal kid, and as for myself, why would I have reason to assume otherwise?
Then high school hit, and my usual habit of cramming for subjects the last couple nights before an exam ceased to cope. Turns out enormous amounts of stress and caffeine (all the pharmaceutical therapy I had access to then) only goes so far, and it only got worse when I crawled into med school.
I realized I had ADHD, badgered my parents to take me to a psychiatrist, and they refused for ages, mostly because they simply couldn't accept that their darling son could have such a disease, as well as the general stigma/ignorance around it in India. It took a complete nervous breakdown for them to finally take me over, and what did you know, I got diagnosed, got meds, and while hardly perfect, am far more capable of handling professional and academic pressures.
For a long time, I thought it was preposterous that people studied until right before exams. Like, can't you just cram dawg? Turns out that, no, most neurotypical people don't need do or die levels of stress or constant micromanagement to do so, even if some leave it off longer than they ought to.
At any rate, ADHD meds work, both on people with "actual" ADHD, depending on where you draw a line on the curve, and even those with above average executive function or conscientiousness. You can't take a happy person and give them antidepressants to make them super duper happy. I'm not inclined to gatekeep, I'd be utterly fucked without meds, so presuming I ever become an actual psychiatrist, I'm inclined to be far less anal than the ones who the blog author encountered.
And my case is mild. It's not obvious at all in normal conversation, nor did it reflect on my grades till the burden simply become too much to cope. My brother is worse struck, and my little nephew is a flagrant example, and I consider them lucky that my suffering will make my/their parents take the issue more seriously. Once again, I complain about methylphenidate/Ritalin. Shit drug, at least in terms of how it makes you feel. I look forward to trying Adderall when I can, since it's not available here. But given that Ritalin still makes me a functional doctor (academically, I can work just fine without it in an actual job), I can't complain too hard.
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This looks like it was written by someone talking slightly too much Adderall (I Can Tell by Some of the Pixels and by Having Taken Quite a Few Adderalls in My Day) and the inverted U's being drawn as normal curves when they'd make more sense as parabolas looks like a tip-off that the author is unconsciously pushing a little too hard at that satisfying feeling of fluent-compression of concepts -- but overall this seems reasonable.
My midwit slap-another-axis-on-it extension of that model would be that (for a given task context, but maybe more broadly shared between a variety of task contexts) there's something like a y-axis of "expected reward for effort" superimposed over the x-axis of exploit-explore, or "focus-divergence" (exploit-explore only trade off at a fixed level of task effort). On that graph, I think the effect of Adderall is to push up-and-left -- to increase the expected reward for exploit-effort. This is very performance-enhancing for people who need more exploit-effort, bad for people who actually need more explore-effort, and mixed for people who already have a good explore-exploit balance but just need to put in more overall effort to improve at the task.
In this model, a depressive state is one where, for almost any available task-action context, the expected reward for effort is very low -- and that's why Adderall can sometimes be a decent antidepressant. The classical hyperactive ADHD state would be higher up the y-axis but shifted way the right, while an inattentive ADHD state might not be as far shifted to the right, but lower down below the x. Each might get some benefit from Adderall pushing up-and-left, but in different ways. And of course, some people who look like any of those phenotypes might just need different task-contexts than the ones they're presented with.
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