why do stimulants help ADHD? well, they short circuit the part where your brain figures out what priorities to trust based on whether they achieve your true motives. if your brain has already learned that your self model is bad at picking actions that eventually pay off towards its true motives, it won’t put its full effort behind those actions. if you can trick it by making every action feel like it’s paying off, you can get it to go along.
honestly unclear whether this is good or bad. on the one hand, if your self model has fallen out of sync, this is pretty necessary to get things done, and could get you out of a bad feedback loop (ADHD is really bad for noticing that your self model has fallen horribly out of sync and acting effectively on it!). some would argue on naturalistic grounds that ideally the true long term solution is to use your brain’s machinery the way it was always intended, by deeply understanding and accepting (and possibly modifying) your actual motives/priorities and having them steer your actions. the other option is to permanently circumvent your motivation system, to turn it into a rubber stamp for whatever decrees are handed down from the self model, which, forever unmoored from needing to model the self, is no longer an understanding of the self but rather an aspirational endpoint towards which the self is molded. I genuinely don’t know which is better as an end goal.
why do stimulants help ADHD? well, they short circuit the part where your brain figures out what priorities to trust based on whether they achieve your true motives
I view taking stimulants more as a move to get the more reflective parts of my brain more power (“getting my taxes done is good, because we need to do it eventually, now is actually a good time, doing my taxes now will be as boring as doing them in the future, rather than playing magic the gathering now”) in steering compared to my more primitive “true motives” that tend to be hyperbolicly discounted (“dosing in bed is nice”, “washing dishes is boring”, “doing taxes is boring”). Maybe I am horrible at self-modelling, but the part where the self model is out of sync as an explanation why the self-reflective parts have less steering power seems unnecessary.
why do stimulants help ADHD? well, they short circuit the part where your brain figures out what priorities to trust based on whether they achieve your true motives. if your brain has already learned that your self model is bad at picking actions that eventually pay off towards its true motives, it won’t put its full effort behind those actions. if you can trick it by making every action feel like it’s paying off, you can get it to go along.
honestly unclear whether this is good or bad. on the one hand, if your self model has fallen out of sync, this is pretty necessary to get things done, and could get you out of a bad feedback loop (ADHD is really bad for noticing that your self model has fallen horribly out of sync and acting effectively on it!). some would argue on naturalistic grounds that ideally the true long term solution is to use your brain’s machinery the way it was always intended, by deeply understanding and accepting (and possibly modifying) your actual motives/priorities and having them steer your actions. the other option is to permanently circumvent your motivation system, to turn it into a rubber stamp for whatever decrees are handed down from the self model, which, forever unmoored from needing to model the self, is no longer an understanding of the self but rather an aspirational endpoint towards which the self is molded. I genuinely don’t know which is better as an end goal.
I view taking stimulants more as a move to get the more reflective parts of my brain more power (“getting my taxes done is good, because we need to do it eventually, now is actually a good time, doing my taxes now will be as boring as doing them in the future, rather than playing magic the gathering now”) in steering compared to my more primitive “true motives” that tend to be hyperbolicly discounted (“dosing in bed is nice”, “washing dishes is boring”, “doing taxes is boring”). Maybe I am horrible at self-modelling, but the part where the self model is out of sync as an explanation why the self-reflective parts have less steering power seems unnecessary.