You’re a Slow Thinker. Now What?

The book discusses this. Albeit for most people the problem is the reverse. They are applying type 1 thinking to situations that require type 2.

When it comes to hiring decisions if there are tied candidates but only one position it can often come down to candidates A was quiet and didn't ask any questions and seems disinterested, but candidate B had loads of questions to ask at the end and seemed really interested and keen and wanted to know x, y, and z.

Who do you think gets hired in those scenarios.

But yeah it is sometimes tempting to turn the tables :). So far no one has done it to me, but not sure what my response would be. "Haha nice joke! Ok we're outta time thanks for coming!" I guess!

The comment you are responding to is just trying to explain their own situation and say the person who wrote the article might want to investigate a similar experience compared to their own. I read the article as one where someone is exploring and ADHD is would be exploration. I would specify that ADHD inattentive type is the one that it reads most like to me.

I don't see why you'd want to knock someone's choice of treatment for a particular condition. You might not see a need for a particular treatment option, but many folks get relief from anxiety or other things such as RSD while being medicated for ADHD. They can make their own decisions.

The brain is complex—adapted, or maladapted, for different tasks. My working hypothesis: mine is maladapted to the behaviors currently rewarded in corporate America. And I know I’m not Feynman.

So here I am, stuck in a bi-modal world (or maybe just worldview). This piece hits hard.

I politely suggest that you check your anti-medication bias at the door. OP is describing a lifetime of feeling s/he is a failure and unable to achieve the goals he would otherwise set for themselves. This is classic ADD symptoms, and the only real therapy with lasting results is medication.

For ADD people such as myself, medication is life-altering in a positive way. I clearly divide my life before and after as different eras: before was a lifetime of failure measured against my own goals (not only external / work requirements), and after a still-ongoing period of self-empowerment and growth.

Yet people such as yourself would attempt to guilt trip and shame us from seeking the only thing which actually helps: modifying our brain chemistry. Why? What reason do you have for shutting down discussion of taking medicine to address a medical condition?

TL;DR: The author, by their own words, is simply coping. ADHD is a disorder, not a "different way of thinking" one chooses to "drug your way" out of. Discovering one has ADHD can be a huge relief. Generally, if you have it, you want to know.

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I disagree with your reading. The article describes the mechanisms the author has developed to cope with their "thinking style." Whether they merely have a unique thought process, or they are suffering from a common mental disability, their optimistic, solution-oriented attitude is adaptive and healthy.

> I'm not a quick witted person. In fact, I’ve always been worried about my brain’s slow processing time.

> But recently, I've realised that slow processing time is not as much of an issue as I thought it was. And even if I was wrong about that, I still think I’d do better for myself by leaning into it, instead of spending energy trying to fight it.

The author has "always" been worried about this. But he's realized it's "not as much of an issue." It reads to me like the author is working to cope with a long-standing difficulty. And they do not say that they have overcome the difficulty, but only that they've found certain approaches to be superior to others.

If the root cause of this long-standing, much-vexing difficulty might be a well-understood condition with standard methods of treatment that have been helpful to many people, it's reasonable to think the author might appreciate that suggestion.

Also, ADHD is not a "different thinking style" anymore than anxiety, depression, or autism are "different thinking styles." It can feel like that to someone who hasn't been diagnosed yet, and even many people diagnosed with ADHD will downplay the condition as being different--not worse. Furthermore, there are even doctors who will indulge in this wishful rhetoric. This is not unlike those in the Deaf community who assert that deafness isn't a disability[1].

In fact, ADHD is a mental disorder. It does not give one special powers of creativity or insight or anything else in compensation for the lack of executive function and emotional regulation. As Dr. Russel Barkley says[2]:

> Now let's be clear, this is a very serious disorder. This is not some trivial little fly-by-night disorder.

> Also, to emphasize something which I don't think is emphasized enough: ADHD is no gift. There is no evidence in any research on any of hundreds of measures that we have taken that show that ADHD predisposes to anything positive in human life. Now let's be clear, ADHD is but a small set of hundreds of psychological abilities that people will have, and many people may be gifted and talented in various aspects of these other human abilities, but never attribute that giftedness or that success to ADHD itself.

I know you hold no malice in your heart, but your comment has drawn several indignant responses because it expresses an attitude that those with ADHD frequently see, and one that easily shades into an outright stigma towards people with ADHD.

I'm not saying that you were saying this, but many people seem to think that people with ADHD are pathologizing normal difficulties and using it to get their hands on fun drugs.

> You get bored at work. Sure, everyone gets bored.

> You have a hard time starting big projects. I can relate.

> You lose track of time sometimes. Me too!

> You know, it kind of seems like you have all the normal struggles in life we all do, but instead of bucking up and just getting stuff done, you've decided to cry to a doctor so you can get cheap addies.

There is nothing admirable about refusing to acknowledge a mental disorder. ADHD is more or less severe in different people, and it's perfectly valid to make an informed choice to forego any treatment for any condition. But it isn't doing the author or anyone else any favors to "refuse to pathologize it" by ignoring the resemblance to a common disorder.

The other part of the puzzle you are missing is that getting diagnosed with ADHD was a hugely positive, life-changing event for many of us who were not diagnosed until adulthood.

To live with undiagnosed ADHD is to live with a condition that makes others see you--and you see yourself--as chronically late and unreliable, unfocused and slow, and disorganized. You are, by all appearances, lazy, irresponsible, and careless: a bad, virtueless person. And over and over again, you fail to reach the eminently achievable goals you set for yourself.

It's an immense relief to discover your life-long shortcomings are not those of a morally defective soul, but of a medically defective brain. And this relief is entirely apart from the hope that medication or another treatment might help.

So perhaps you can now understand why those who have experienced this unburdening are eager to pay it forward. It's not like being diagnosed with cancer. We've always known the struggle. Now we know the enemy with whom we struggle.

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/deaf/comments/134tw70/do_you_identi...

2. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9w6YL5__Z8

Edit: Added a TL;DR, removed an unnecessary quote, and made a couple slight wording changes.

I don't think it's so much about that... it's more that having a label for a common set of behaviors/symptoms can be a shorthand to explain things more succinctly.

Btw, would you say the same thing about clinical depression? Why/why not?

> Why drug your way to a different thinking style?

Because ADHD (and other things) can be crippling when it comes to actually getting IRL shit that needs doing... done. "We live in a society" is a meme, but there's actually a lot of stuff that can present non-trivial hurdles for neuro-divergent people IRL ... like filing taxes, going to an unemployment office, etc. etc.

(Also, that's not quite what the drugs do if you have ADHD, but I digress)

I have struggled with this myself with ADHD where I think my brain is great and it is society that is wrong as many of the ways I do things/see things/operate are subtly shunned by society and the way it works. Everything from the typical 9-5 (my brain works best 11-7), to most white collar careers revolving around stationary work at a desk (I love difficult mental work, but think better when I'm moving around), etc.

I don't think my brain is wrong or performing poorly, I excelled at school but did not learn much from lecture style formats (figured out how to study on my own). But I have gone back and forth with medication because it is very, very difficult to construct my life in a way that plays to my strengths when they are so different than the norm. Medication helps my brain fit into society better, but I don't think it improves my brain function.

As to the rest of your comment, not to diminish your experience, it’s really difficult to tell what you’re trying to say, and how that has to do with any of the very specific symptoms and experiences mentioned.

Must have actually been an EEG by the description, right?

But the main point of my comment was that the situations in which I have felt slow, I have later realized that is only because some other people confidently state the first thought that comes to their mind. They are quick to answer but not any quicker to the final conclusion (which may be days away).

Oh, but they do, if you want to have future conversations with them. As a slow thinker with the same social issues as OP, trust me, they do. Nobody wants to keep talking to someone they consider boring, and first impressions are still the most important impressions.

  > “Oh just preparing my off-the-cuff remarks for tomorrow”

  | "Shower thoughts only work, when you put in the work." You have to actually spend time trying to brainstorm something, trying to think of something, and at the end of it you'll've made no progress and be discouraged. But then randomly, later, in the shower, doing something completely unrelated, the idea hits. 

I think we would be naive to assume quick responses are a good measure of one's intelligence[1]. I know this is common, but I think it is missing the same thing that quick responses also tend to miss: depth. You can be fast and deep, but more often people are fast and wrong[2]. More complex the topic the easier it is to be unaware of how wrong.

[0] https://youtu.be/9FL7IZavt1I?t=93

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45242293

[2] https://0x0.st/KcAU.png

[Edit] I wanted to add that I found this method highly effective during my PhD. It requires a balance of churning the wheels and walking away. Progress is invisible until the finish line is in sight, so you need to spend time pushing even if it looks like you are getting nowhere. But at the same time, you need to walk away. If you keep pushing you'll never have that time for those random thoughts. There's a laundry list of famous physicist[3] who used to "only work" for a few hours a day and then do things like go on long walks or play tennis. I think that fits into this model. It seems to be a critical aspect for any creative work. Honestly, I would find that the most common mistake I would make is sitting at my desk for too long. It results in a narrowing of focus. There's a lot of times we want that narrowing, but there's also plenty of times we want to think more broadly. I think this is very true for programming in general. I can sympathize with managers who look at people doing these things and interpret them as being unproductive. But I think the reality is that productivity is just a really hard thing to measure when you're not a machine stamping out well defined widgets. I think this ends up with us just making fewer "widgets" and of lower quality. I mean it isn't like you can measure quality by anything as simple as the number of lines of code or number of Jira tickets knocked off. Hell, if you are too narrow your solutions are probably creating more tickets than you're knocking off! But that's completely invisible, only measurable post hoc, and even then quite difficult to measure (if not impossible).

We often talk about current "titans" and all of them boast their long hours and "dedication." People like Elon suggesting 120hrs or the growing 996 paradigm. But I'm unconvinced this really checks out. If anything, it appears much more common that Nobel scientists worked fewer hours, not more. We're all not working on Nobel level work, but it does beg the question of what the most effective strategy actually is. Certainly we can't conclude longer hours at the desk yields better output. We can't counterfactually conclude that Dirac would have been even greater had he spent 16 hrs a day working rather than a handful. "More hours" just seems to be a naive oversimplification, highly related to these "shower thoughts"

[3] Dirac is a famous example, who colleagues would also jokingly use the unit "Dirac" in reference to "one word per hour". Notoriously "slow" thinker, but a surefire candidate for one of the smartest humans to ever exist. Poincare famously worked 10am till noon then 5pm till 7pm. Darwin followed a similar model.

It is uproariously funny and very relevant.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/c1korj/jeremy_v...

It tells the tale of how the man who was going to become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom used to play the improviser and ex tempore comedian, in a practiced and automatic way.

If you want to be able to hit a ball it doesn't matter how much thought you put into it - the learning is all about programming your lower instinctive brain and it only has the input device of repetition. This brain level has the ability to work at much lower latency - which is critical for reactive physical tasks.

I suspect it is the same here. You can certainly learn to speak using different levels of your brain as well. Case in point public speaking - the reason this is hard is generally you have to trust your mouth on automatic mode to follow behind and using the thinking part of your brain to better plan (or remember) ahead to build a narrative path.