It seems you’re saying “everything is psychology; nothing is neurology”
I like the rest of your example, but this line confuses me. I don’t think I’m saying this, I don’t agree with the statement even if I somehow said it, and either way I don’t see how it connects to what you’re saying about ADHD.
…ADHD exists, and for someone with it to a significant degree, there is a real lack of slack (e.g. inability to engage in long-term preparations that require consistent boring effort, brought about by chronically low dopamine), and coffee (or other stimulants) trades one problem (can’t focus) for another (need coffee).
I… agree? Actually, as I reread this, I’m not sure how this relates to what I was saying in the OP. I think maybe you’re saying that someone can choose to reach for coffee for reasons other than wakefulness or energy control. Yes?
If so, I’d say… sure, yeah. Although I don’t know if this affects anything about the point I was making at all.
Donning the adaptive entropy lens, the place my attention goes to is the “chronically low dopamine”. Why is that? What prevents the body from adapting to its context?
I know very little about the biochemistry of ADHD. But I do know lots of people who “have ADHD” who don’t seem to have any problems anymore. Not because they’ve overcome the “condition” but because they treated it as a context for the kind of life they wanted to build and live. One of them runs a multi-million dollar company she built.
So speaking from a pretty thorough ignorance of the topic itself, my guess based on my priors is that the problem-ness of ADHD has more to do with the combo of (a) taking in the culture’s demand that you be functional in a very particular way combined with (b) a built-in incapability of functioning that way.
So there we’ve got the imposition of a predetermined conclusion, in (a).
But maybe I’m just way off in terms of how ADHD works. I don’t know.
My point was about the most common use of caffeine, and I think that holds just fine.
The rejection here seems to have overlap with pain is not the unit of effort, which I read as basically saying that truly trying harder is meaningfully distinct form throwing more force behind the same strategy.
I hadn’t read that post. Still haven’t. But to the rest, yes. I agree.
I’d just add that “the same strategy” can be extremely meta. It’s stunning how much energy can go into trying “something new” in a pursuer/avoider dynamic in ways that just reenact the problem despite explicitly trying not to.
The true true “trying harder” that doesn’t do this doesn’t feel to me like something I’d want to call “trying harder”. It feels a lot more like “Oh, that’s the clear path.” Not exactly effortless, but something like conflict-less.
[the article] seems to be conflating “effort” or “execution” with “force”. Barring some kind of perfect reflexive closure on beliefs, which is uncommon, achieving outcomes takes effort: sometimes you need to decide how to direct this effort, and that itself takes effort; sometimes you need to decide whether to allocate effort to long-term goals vs short-term goals vs finding better goals, and that itself takes effort.
Mmm. Yes, this is an important distinction. I think to the extent that it didn’t come across in the OP, that was a matter of how the OP was hacked together, not something I’m missing in my intent.
When I’m talking about pushing or effort or force, there’s a pretty specific phenomenology that goes with what I’m talking about. It’s an application of force specifically to overwhelm something intelligent that doesn’t want to go that way. That’s the whole reason for the force I’m talking about.
Like, why make yourself go jogging? Obviously jogging involves effort, but if you were skin to bones aligned with this as what you wanted to do, you’d just… engage in the effort. So why do you have to add tricks like decreasing the activation energy to start, and having an accountability buddy, and setting a Beeminder, etc.?
(A rhetorical “you”, not you personally. I have no idea what your relationship to jogging is.)
The whole reason for those strategies is because there’s something fighting back. And the entropic answer to that pushback is… to push forward harder.
That’s the “force” I’m talking about.
There’s no way to make exercise literally effortless. But there’s totally a way to make it something like internally frictionless.
The main point of the OP is basically that doing things with internal friction by intending harder increases internal friction, and decreasing that internal friction matters way way way more than nearly anything you can in practice achieve by overwhelming it.
I agree that the language is confusing. Using “effort” and “force” and “trying” to point at this doesn’t do justice to the fact that basically everything requires some kind of effort.
But… I think there’s a clear thing once you see the pattern. At least it’s very clear to me, even if I don’t have better words for it.
It was just a handle that came to mind for the concept that I’m trying to warn against. Reading your post I get a sense that it’s implicitly claiming that everything is mutable and nothing is fixed; eh… that’s not right either. Like, it feels like it implicitly and automatically rejects that something like a coffee habit can be the correct move even if you look several levels up.
I think maybe you’re saying that someone can choose to reach for coffee for reasons other than wakefulness or energy control.
More specifically, that coffee may be part of a healthy strategy for managing your own biochemistry. I don’t think you say otherwise in the post, but it felt strongly suggested.
Donning the adaptive entropy lens, the place my attention goes to is the “chronically low dopamine”. Why is that? What prevents the body from adapting to its context?
I think this is something I’m pushing back (lightly) against; I do not, on priors, expect every “problem” to be a failure of adaptation. Like, there might be a congenital set point, and you might have it in the bottom decile (note, I’m not saying that’s actually the way it works).
I’d just add that “the same strategy” can be extremely meta.
👍
Mmm. Yes, this is an important distinction. I think to the extent that it didn’t come across in the OP, that was a matter of how the OP was hacked together, not something I’m missing in my intent.
Makes sense; consider it something between “feedback on the article as written” and “breadcrumbs for others reading”.
Is it clear to you?
I think… that I glimpse the dynamic you’re talking about, and that I’m generally aware of it’s simplest version and try to employ conditions/consequences reasoning, but I do not consistently see it more generally.
it feels like [the OP] implicitly and automatically rejects that something like a coffee habit can be the correct move even if you look several levels up.
Ah. Got it.
That’s not what I mean whatsoever.
I don’t think it’s a mistake to incur adaptive entropy. When it happens, it’s because that’s literally the best move the system in question (person, culture, whatever) can make, given its constraints.
Like, incurring technical debt isn’t a mistake. It’s literally the best move available at the time given the constraints. There’s no blame in my saying that whatsoever. It’s just true.
And, it’s also true that technical debt incurs an ongoing cost. Again, no blame. It’s just true.
In the same way (and really, as a generalization), incurring adaptive entropy always incurs a cost. That doesn’t make it wrong to do. It’s just true.
I do not, on priors, expect every “problem” to be a failure of adaptation.
I think this is a challenge of different definitions. To me, what “adaptation” and “problem” mean requires that every problem be a failure of adaptation. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a problem!
I’m getting the impression that questions of blame or screw-up or making mistakes are crawling into several discussion points in these comments. Those questions are so far removed from my frame of thinking here that I just flat-out forgot to orient to them. They just don’t have anything to do with what I’m talking about.
So when I say something like “a failure of adaptation”, I’m talking about a fact. No blame, no “should”. The way bacteria fail to adapt to bleach. Just a fact.
Everything we’re inclined to call a “problem” is an encounter with a need to adapt that we haven’t yet adapted to. That’s what a problem is, to me.
So any persistent problem is literally the same thing as an encounter with limitations in our ability to adapt.
I think… that I glimpse the dynamic you’re talking about, and that I’m generally aware of it’s simplest version and try to employ conditions/consequences reasoning, but I do not consistently see it more generally.
Cool, good to know. Thank you.
Sleeping on it, I also see connections to patterns of refactored agency (specifically pervasiveness) and out to get you. The difference is that while you’re describing something like a physical principle, from “out to get you” more of a social principle, and “refactored agency” is describing a useful thinking perspective.
I don’t follow this, sorry. I think I’d have to read those articles. I might later. For now, I’m just acknowledging that you’ve said… something here, but I’m not sure what you’ve said, so I don’t have much to say in response just yet.
I think this is a challenge of different definitions. To me, what “adaptation” and “problem” mean requires that every problem be a failure of adaptation. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a problem!
This was poor wording on my part; I think there’s both a narrow sense of “adaptation” and a broader sense in play, and I mistakenly invoked the narrow sense to disagree. Like, continuing with the convenient fictional example of an at-birth dopamine set-point, the body cannot adapt to increase the set-point, but this is qualitatively different than a set-point that’s controllable through diet; the latter has the potential to adapt, while the former cannot, so it’s not a “failure” in some sense.
I feel like there’s another relevant bit, though: whenever we talk of systems, a lot depends on where we draw the boundaries, and it’s inherently somewhat arbitrary. The “need” for caffeine may be a failure of adaptation in the subsystem (my body), but a habit of caffeine intake is an example of adaptation in the supersystem (my body + my agency + the modern supply chain)
I think I’d have to read those articles. I might later.
I think I can summarize the connection I made.
In “out to get you”, Zvi points out an adversarial dynamic when interacting with almost all human-created systems, in that they are designed to extract something from you, often without limit (the article also suggests that there are broadly four strategies for dealing with this). The idea of something intelligent being after your resources reminds me of your description of adaptive entropy.
In “refactored agency”, Venkatesh Rao describes a cognitive reframing that I find particularly useful in which you ascribe agency to different parts of a system. It’s not descriptive of a phenomenon (unlike, say, an egregore, or autopoesis) but of a lens through which to view a system. This is particularly useful for seeking novel insights or solutions; for example, how would problems and solutions differ if you view yourself as a “cog in the machine” vs “the hero”, or your coworkers as “Moloch’s pawns” rather than as “player characters, making choices” (these specific examples are my own extrapolations, not direct from the text). Again, ascribing agency/intelligence to the adaptive entropy, reminds me of this.
Everything we’re inclined to call a “problem” is an encounter with a need to adapt that we haven’t yet adapted to. That’s what a problem is, to me.
This is tangential, but it strongly reminds me of the TRIZ framing of a problem (or “contradiction” as they call it): it’s defined by the desire for two (apparently) opposing things (e.g. faster and slower).
Thanks for your post, just wanted to contribute by deconfusing ADHD a little (hopefully). I agree that you and OP seem to be agreeing more than disagreeing.
So speaking from a pretty thorough ignorance of the topic itself, my guess based on my priors is that the problem-ness of ADHD has more to do with the combo of (a) taking in the culture’s demand that you be functional in a very particular way combined with (b) a built-in incapability of functioning that way.
Correct. However that problem-ness is often a matter of survival/highly non-optional. ADHD can be an economic (and thus kinda literal) death sentence—if it wasn’t for the support of my family I’d be homeless.
I think what the OP is referring to, why they raised ADHD specifically in this context, is because this habitualized conscious forcing/manipulation of our internal state (i.e. dopamine) is a crutch we can’t afford to relinquish—without it we fall down, and we don’t get back up.
I’m speaking as someone only recently (last year) diagnosed with (and medicated for) ADHD. I am easily twice as functional now as I was before I had medication (and I am still nowhere near as functional as the average person, let alone most of this crowd xD)
And, quite tidily, ADHD is one of the primary reasons I learned to develop slack—why I’m capable of grokking your position. ADHD is a neverending lesson in the necessity of slack, in learning to let go.
ADHD is basically an extreme version of slack philosophy hardwired into your brain—it’s great from a certain perspective, but it kinda gives us a healthy appreciation for the value of being able to force outcomes—in a ‘you don’t know what you’ve got til its gone’ sense.
I raised ADHD because it was the first thing that popped into my mind where a chemical habit feels internally aligned, such that the narrative of the “addiction” reducing slack rang hollow.
And, quite tidily, ADHD is one of the primary reasons I learned to develop slack.
ADHD is basically an extreme version of slack philosophy hardwired into your brain.
That has not actually been my experience, but I get the sense that my ADHD is much milder than yours. I also get the sense that your experience w.r.t. ADHD and slack is really common for anything that is kinda-sorta-disabilityish this old post comes to mind, even though it doesn’t explicitly mention it).
I think what the OP is referring to, why they raised ADHD specifically in this context, is because this habitualized conscious forcing/manipulation of our internal state (i.e. dopamine) is a crutch we can’t afford to relinquish—without it we fall down, and we don’t get back up.
Gotcha. I don’t claim to fully understand — I have trouble imagining the experience you’re describing from the inside — but this gives me a hint.
FWIW, I interpret this as “Oh, so this kind of ADHD is a condition where your adaptive capacity is too low to avoid incurring adaptive entropy from the culture.”
This is actually confounded when using ADHD as an example because there’s two dynamics at play:
Any “disability” (construed broadly, under the social model of disability) is, almost by definition, a case where your adaptive capacity is lower than expected (by society)
ADHD specifically affects executive function and impulse control, leading to a reduced ability to force, or do anything that isn’t basically effortless.
The text can be taken in a way where the need of coffee is because of a unreasonable demand or previous screwup.
Obviously some kind of process in my body disagrees with my mental idea of how I should be.
This can feel like there is some (typical)neurologial balance state and all deviation is a “definement of nature”.
For ADHD it might be apt to say that the brain can not be as stimulated as it would like to be. It would actually really agree to be more stimulated.
I found it a bit surprising but instruction booklet for ADHD included a line to the effect of “ADHD persons find it hard to focus. This is not their fault that they can not deal with these kinds of situations”, so the mitigation of the stigma must be real important when it is included alongside the most technical information of what medicines you should not mix etc.
A quesiton like
why isn’t that fact enough for me to have the right amount of energy?
has an actual proper answer with ADHD in that executive function parts of the brain are too weak/tired. Here it is kinda implied that there is no proper reason to end up in this conclusion. Everybody does not have an (totally) able brain.
Everybody not having their stats in the same configuration can be fine neurodiversity. But the low stats are a thing and they have real effects.
I do think that ADHD per se does not mean one can’t prepare. But preparing can’t rely on the standard memes and knicks. It can look like more post-it notes and more diligent calendar use.
The text can be taken in a way where the need of coffee is because of a unreasonable demand or previous screwup.
Ah. To me that interpretation misses the core point, so it didn’t cross my mind.
Judgments like “unreasonable” and “screwup” are coming from inside an adaptive-entropic system. That doesn’t define how that kind of entropy works. The mechanism is just true. It’s neutral, the way reality is neutral.
The need for coffee (in the example I gave) arises because of a tension between two adaptive systems: the one being identified with, and the one being imposed upon. And there’s a cost to that tension, such as the need for coffee.
I don’t feel this way about something like, say, taking oral vitamin D in the winter. That’s not in opposition to some adaptive subsystem in me or in the world. It’s actually me adapting to my constraints.
If someone’s relationship to caffeine were like that, I wouldn’t say it’s entropy-inducing.
But when it is entropy-inducing, it’s because of this “imposing an idea” structure.
…and that isn’t to say it’s a mistake! That, too, is imposing an idea of how things should be. The whole reason anyone incurs entropy is because that’s literally the best move available to them best as they can tell. Doing anything else would (apparently) be worse for them.
There’s no blame or “should” here. Just description of cause and effect — which, yes, bears on what what people might want to do, but doesn’t start from there. Cannot start from there.
…executive function parts of the brain are too weak/tired [in ADHD].
Cool. As I said in another comment, from this I’m taking that ADHD (as you’re talking about it) is about having a particular kind of reduced adaptive capacity.
My eyes still go to “Why are they too weak/tired?” and “What’s the ‘too’ in comparison to?” The former is about causation chains, because if there’s a limitation on adaptive capacity that a system can be aware of, it will want to route around it. So why hasn’t an effective route around it been found? What’s limiting the meta-adaptive capacity? This chain often leads to noticing spots of adaptive entropy in the environment.
And the “What’s the ‘too’ in comparison to?” often leads to noticing how people take on the adaptive entropy of the larger context.
But sometimes limited adaptive capacity is just that. Like, humans die of old age, and sure we might be able to engineer our way around that eventually and our inability to take that engineering seriously is because of collective adaptive entropy… but no amount of sitting alone in a cave meditating is going to make you biologically immortal. That’s just an adaptive limitation.
I’m hearing you say that ADHD is like that, and that an ADHD person’s use of caffeine is therefore different from the case I named in the OP.
If so: cool.
I wonder how much of this whole topic coming up is a matter of taking “You’ve incurred adaptive entropy” as a matter of blame or shame. Like I’m saying it’s bad or wrong to do this. And the objection is basically “ADHD folk need to engage with caffeine or something like it, so they shouldn’t be blamed!”
FWIW, I promise that’s not what I mean. Not even a little bit. Zero blame. Truly.
I don’t feel this way about something like, say, taking oral vitamin D in the winter. That’s not in opposition to some adaptive subsystem in me or in the world. It’s actually me adapting to my constraints.
If someone’s relationship to caffeine were like that, I wouldn’t say it’s entropy-inducing.
I think this answers a question / request for clarification I had. So now I don’t have to ask.
(The question was something like “But sometimes I use caffeine because I don’t want to fall asleep while I’m driving (and things outside my controll made it so that doing a few hundred of driving km now-ish is the best option I can see)”).
I believe your goal is not to blame. But having good intentions does not mean you have good effects (pavements and all). It does ward off malicioussness but does not guarantee that the assistance helps. Being curious about the effects of you actions helps. But rare side effects might not be obvious at all. Rejecting feedback with “I couldn’t have known” can prevent knowing the bits for the future.
I don’t feel this way about something like, say, taking oral vitamin D in the winter. That’s not in opposition to some adaptive subsystem in me or in the world. It’s actually me adapting to my constraints.
With this the intention probably is not to disinclude people living in equatorial areas. But if winter gets as much light as summer this kind of D-vitamin pattern would not make sense. So even if we do not intend to and even if we are aware what is going on this kind of analog does disinclude equatorial people.
If you lived in constant shade then it could make sense to take D-vitamin both in summer and winter. In an important way the coffee is like vitamin-D for (some of) ADHD situations. So largely for “If so: cool.” indeed that way.
(stickler for possibility claims: If one thinks that AGI can make biological immortality and that meditation can lead to a working AGI scheme then meditation can lead to biological immortality (but I know what that passage gets at))
If standard lectures last for 2 hours and a anomalous lecture lasts for 4 hours and in the last hour nobody can follow anything, it tends to be that the diagnosis is that the lecture is too long. If a student can only pay attention for the first hour of a 2 hour lecture the diagnosis tends to be that the student is too impatient.
I would not say that if somebody has low muscle mass that their capacity to change their muscle mass is impaired (that there is some problem of them using a weightlifting gym). “Do you even lift?” implies that (all) humans should lift. Not everything is worth changing and possible to change. I don’t have great pointers on more neboulous feeling where I think others are based in their reactions. I know the thing was meant conditionally. But bits like
And yeah, I do think it’s the right word, which is why I’m picking it. Please notice the framing effect, and adjust yourself as needed.
and
Oops
mean stuff. (if you leave your terms open then you can’t effectively say that you mean 0 of something. One risks meaning slightly bad stuff for vague terms. That can be an understandble tradeoff to make communication possible at all (or be at some required handiness bar))
I like the rest of your example, but this line confuses me. I don’t think I’m saying this, I don’t agree with the statement even if I somehow said it, and either way I don’t see how it connects to what you’re saying about ADHD.
I… agree? Actually, as I reread this, I’m not sure how this relates to what I was saying in the OP. I think maybe you’re saying that someone can choose to reach for coffee for reasons other than wakefulness or energy control. Yes?
If so, I’d say… sure, yeah. Although I don’t know if this affects anything about the point I was making at all.
Donning the adaptive entropy lens, the place my attention goes to is the “chronically low dopamine”. Why is that? What prevents the body from adapting to its context?
I know very little about the biochemistry of ADHD. But I do know lots of people who “have ADHD” who don’t seem to have any problems anymore. Not because they’ve overcome the “condition” but because they treated it as a context for the kind of life they wanted to build and live. One of them runs a multi-million dollar company she built.
So speaking from a pretty thorough ignorance of the topic itself, my guess based on my priors is that the problem-ness of ADHD has more to do with the combo of (a) taking in the culture’s demand that you be functional in a very particular way combined with (b) a built-in incapability of functioning that way.
So there we’ve got the imposition of a predetermined conclusion, in (a).
But maybe I’m just way off in terms of how ADHD works. I don’t know.
My point was about the most common use of caffeine, and I think that holds just fine.
I hadn’t read that post. Still haven’t. But to the rest, yes. I agree.
I’d just add that “the same strategy” can be extremely meta. It’s stunning how much energy can go into trying “something new” in a pursuer/avoider dynamic in ways that just reenact the problem despite explicitly trying not to.
The true true “trying harder” that doesn’t do this doesn’t feel to me like something I’d want to call “trying harder”. It feels a lot more like “Oh, that’s the clear path.” Not exactly effortless, but something like conflict-less.
Mmm. Yes, this is an important distinction. I think to the extent that it didn’t come across in the OP, that was a matter of how the OP was hacked together, not something I’m missing in my intent.
When I’m talking about pushing or effort or force, there’s a pretty specific phenomenology that goes with what I’m talking about. It’s an application of force specifically to overwhelm something intelligent that doesn’t want to go that way. That’s the whole reason for the force I’m talking about.
Like, why make yourself go jogging? Obviously jogging involves effort, but if you were skin to bones aligned with this as what you wanted to do, you’d just… engage in the effort. So why do you have to add tricks like decreasing the activation energy to start, and having an accountability buddy, and setting a Beeminder, etc.?
(A rhetorical “you”, not you personally. I have no idea what your relationship to jogging is.)
The whole reason for those strategies is because there’s something fighting back. And the entropic answer to that pushback is… to push forward harder.
That’s the “force” I’m talking about.
There’s no way to make exercise literally effortless. But there’s totally a way to make it something like internally frictionless.
The main point of the OP is basically that doing things with internal friction by intending harder increases internal friction, and decreasing that internal friction matters way way way more than nearly anything you can in practice achieve by overwhelming it.
I agree that the language is confusing. Using “effort” and “force” and “trying” to point at this doesn’t do justice to the fact that basically everything requires some kind of effort.
But… I think there’s a clear thing once you see the pattern. At least it’s very clear to me, even if I don’t have better words for it.
Is it clear to you?
It was just a handle that came to mind for the concept that I’m trying to warn against. Reading your post I get a sense that it’s implicitly claiming that everything is mutable and nothing is fixed; eh… that’s not right either. Like, it feels like it implicitly and automatically rejects that something like a coffee habit can be the correct move even if you look several levels up.
More specifically, that coffee may be part of a healthy strategy for managing your own biochemistry. I don’t think you say otherwise in the post, but it felt strongly suggested.
I think this is something I’m pushing back (lightly) against; I do not, on priors, expect every “problem” to be a failure of adaptation. Like, there might be a congenital set point, and you might have it in the bottom decile (note, I’m not saying that’s actually the way it works).
👍
Makes sense; consider it something between “feedback on the article as written” and “breadcrumbs for others reading”.
I think… that I glimpse the dynamic you’re talking about, and that I’m generally aware of it’s simplest version and try to employ conditions/consequences reasoning, but I do not consistently see it more generally.
[EDIT]
Sleeping on it, I also see connections to [patterns of refactored agency](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/11/27/patterns-of-refactored-agency/) (specifically pervasiveness) and [out to get you](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/09/23/out-to-get-you/). The difference is that while you’re describing something like a physical principle, from “out to get you” more of a social principle, and “refactored agency” is describing a useful thinking perspective.
Ah. Got it.
That’s not what I mean whatsoever.
I don’t think it’s a mistake to incur adaptive entropy. When it happens, it’s because that’s literally the best move the system in question (person, culture, whatever) can make, given its constraints.
Like, incurring technical debt isn’t a mistake. It’s literally the best move available at the time given the constraints. There’s no blame in my saying that whatsoever. It’s just true.
And, it’s also true that technical debt incurs an ongoing cost. Again, no blame. It’s just true.
In the same way (and really, as a generalization), incurring adaptive entropy always incurs a cost. That doesn’t make it wrong to do. It’s just true.
I think this is a challenge of different definitions. To me, what “adaptation” and “problem” mean requires that every problem be a failure of adaptation. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a problem!
I’m getting the impression that questions of blame or screw-up or making mistakes are crawling into several discussion points in these comments. Those questions are so far removed from my frame of thinking here that I just flat-out forgot to orient to them. They just don’t have anything to do with what I’m talking about.
So when I say something like “a failure of adaptation”, I’m talking about a fact. No blame, no “should”. The way bacteria fail to adapt to bleach. Just a fact.
Everything we’re inclined to call a “problem” is an encounter with a need to adapt that we haven’t yet adapted to. That’s what a problem is, to me.
So any persistent problem is literally the same thing as an encounter with limitations in our ability to adapt.
Cool, good to know. Thank you.
I don’t follow this, sorry. I think I’d have to read those articles. I might later. For now, I’m just acknowledging that you’ve said… something here, but I’m not sure what you’ve said, so I don’t have much to say in response just yet.
This was poor wording on my part; I think there’s both a narrow sense of “adaptation” and a broader sense in play, and I mistakenly invoked the narrow sense to disagree. Like, continuing with the convenient fictional example of an at-birth dopamine set-point, the body cannot adapt to increase the set-point, but this is qualitatively different than a set-point that’s controllable through diet; the latter has the potential to adapt, while the former cannot, so it’s not a “failure” in some sense.
I feel like there’s another relevant bit, though: whenever we talk of systems, a lot depends on where we draw the boundaries, and it’s inherently somewhat arbitrary. The “need” for caffeine may be a failure of adaptation in the subsystem (my body), but a habit of caffeine intake is an example of adaptation in the supersystem (my body + my agency + the modern supply chain)
I think I can summarize the connection I made.
In “out to get you”, Zvi points out an adversarial dynamic when interacting with almost all human-created systems, in that they are designed to extract something from you, often without limit (the article also suggests that there are broadly four strategies for dealing with this). The idea of something intelligent being after your resources reminds me of your description of adaptive entropy.
In “refactored agency”, Venkatesh Rao describes a cognitive reframing that I find particularly useful in which you ascribe agency to different parts of a system. It’s not descriptive of a phenomenon (unlike, say, an egregore, or autopoesis) but of a lens through which to view a system. This is particularly useful for seeking novel insights or solutions; for example, how would problems and solutions differ if you view yourself as a “cog in the machine” vs “the hero”, or your coworkers as “Moloch’s pawns” rather than as “player characters, making choices” (these specific examples are my own extrapolations, not direct from the text). Again, ascribing agency/intelligence to the adaptive entropy, reminds me of this.
This is tangential, but it strongly reminds me of the TRIZ framing of a problem (or “contradiction” as they call it): it’s defined by the desire for two (apparently) opposing things (e.g. faster and slower).
Thanks for your post, just wanted to contribute by deconfusing ADHD a little (hopefully). I agree that you and OP seem to be agreeing more than disagreeing.
Correct. However that problem-ness is often a matter of survival/highly non-optional. ADHD can be an economic (and thus kinda literal) death sentence—if it wasn’t for the support of my family I’d be homeless.
I think what the OP is referring to, why they raised ADHD specifically in this context, is because this habitualized conscious forcing/manipulation of our internal state (i.e. dopamine) is a crutch we can’t afford to relinquish—without it we fall down, and we don’t get back up.
I’m speaking as someone only recently (last year) diagnosed with (and medicated for) ADHD. I am easily twice as functional now as I was before I had medication (and I am still nowhere near as functional as the average person, let alone most of this crowd xD)
And, quite tidily, ADHD is one of the primary reasons I learned to develop slack—why I’m capable of grokking your position. ADHD is a neverending lesson in the necessity of slack, in learning to let go.
ADHD is basically an extreme version of slack philosophy hardwired into your brain—it’s great from a certain perspective, but it kinda gives us a healthy appreciation for the value of being able to force outcomes—in a ‘you don’t know what you’ve got til its gone’ sense.
I did start with “I agree 90%.”
I raised ADHD because it was the first thing that popped into my mind where a chemical habit feels internally aligned, such that the narrative of the “addiction” reducing slack rang hollow.
That has not actually been my experience, but I get the sense that my ADHD is much milder than yours. I also get the sense that your experience w.r.t. ADHD and slack is really common for anything that is kinda-sorta-disabilityish this old post comes to mind, even though it doesn’t explicitly mention it).
I found this super helpful. Thank you.
Gotcha. I don’t claim to fully understand — I have trouble imagining the experience you’re describing from the inside — but this gives me a hint.
FWIW, I interpret this as “Oh, so this kind of ADHD is a condition where your adaptive capacity is too low to avoid incurring adaptive entropy from the culture.”
This is actually confounded when using ADHD as an example because there’s two dynamics at play:
Any “disability” (construed broadly, under the social model of disability) is, almost by definition, a case where your adaptive capacity is lower than expected (by society)
ADHD specifically affects executive function and impulse control, leading to a reduced ability to force, or do anything that isn’t basically effortless.
The text can be taken in a way where the need of coffee is because of a unreasonable demand or previous screwup.
This can feel like there is some (typical)neurologial balance state and all deviation is a “definement of nature”.
For ADHD it might be apt to say that the brain can not be as stimulated as it would like to be. It would actually really agree to be more stimulated.
I found it a bit surprising but instruction booklet for ADHD included a line to the effect of “ADHD persons find it hard to focus. This is not their fault that they can not deal with these kinds of situations”, so the mitigation of the stigma must be real important when it is included alongside the most technical information of what medicines you should not mix etc.
A quesiton like
has an actual proper answer with ADHD in that executive function parts of the brain are too weak/tired. Here it is kinda implied that there is no proper reason to end up in this conclusion. Everybody does not have an (totally) able brain.
Everybody not having their stats in the same configuration can be fine neurodiversity. But the low stats are a thing and they have real effects.
I do think that ADHD per se does not mean one can’t prepare. But preparing can’t rely on the standard memes and knicks. It can look like more post-it notes and more diligent calendar use.
Ah. To me that interpretation misses the core point, so it didn’t cross my mind.
Judgments like “unreasonable” and “screwup” are coming from inside an adaptive-entropic system. That doesn’t define how that kind of entropy works. The mechanism is just true. It’s neutral, the way reality is neutral.
The need for coffee (in the example I gave) arises because of a tension between two adaptive systems: the one being identified with, and the one being imposed upon. And there’s a cost to that tension, such as the need for coffee.
I don’t feel this way about something like, say, taking oral vitamin D in the winter. That’s not in opposition to some adaptive subsystem in me or in the world. It’s actually me adapting to my constraints.
If someone’s relationship to caffeine were like that, I wouldn’t say it’s entropy-inducing.
But when it is entropy-inducing, it’s because of this “imposing an idea” structure.
…and that isn’t to say it’s a mistake! That, too, is imposing an idea of how things should be. The whole reason anyone incurs entropy is because that’s literally the best move available to them best as they can tell. Doing anything else would (apparently) be worse for them.
There’s no blame or “should” here. Just description of cause and effect — which, yes, bears on what what people might want to do, but doesn’t start from there. Cannot start from there.
Cool. As I said in another comment, from this I’m taking that ADHD (as you’re talking about it) is about having a particular kind of reduced adaptive capacity.
My eyes still go to “Why are they too weak/tired?” and “What’s the ‘too’ in comparison to?” The former is about causation chains, because if there’s a limitation on adaptive capacity that a system can be aware of, it will want to route around it. So why hasn’t an effective route around it been found? What’s limiting the meta-adaptive capacity? This chain often leads to noticing spots of adaptive entropy in the environment.
And the “What’s the ‘too’ in comparison to?” often leads to noticing how people take on the adaptive entropy of the larger context.
But sometimes limited adaptive capacity is just that. Like, humans die of old age, and sure we might be able to engineer our way around that eventually and our inability to take that engineering seriously is because of collective adaptive entropy… but no amount of sitting alone in a cave meditating is going to make you biologically immortal. That’s just an adaptive limitation.
I’m hearing you say that ADHD is like that, and that an ADHD person’s use of caffeine is therefore different from the case I named in the OP.
If so: cool.
I wonder how much of this whole topic coming up is a matter of taking “You’ve incurred adaptive entropy” as a matter of blame or shame. Like I’m saying it’s bad or wrong to do this. And the objection is basically “ADHD folk need to engage with caffeine or something like it, so they shouldn’t be blamed!”
FWIW, I promise that’s not what I mean. Not even a little bit. Zero blame. Truly.
I think this answers a question / request for clarification I had. So now I don’t have to ask.
(The question was something like “But sometimes I use caffeine because I don’t want to fall asleep while I’m driving (and things outside my controll made it so that doing a few hundred of driving km now-ish is the best option I can see)”).
I believe your goal is not to blame. But having good intentions does not mean you have good effects (pavements and all). It does ward off malicioussness but does not guarantee that the assistance helps. Being curious about the effects of you actions helps. But rare side effects might not be obvious at all. Rejecting feedback with “I couldn’t have known” can prevent knowing the bits for the future.
With this the intention probably is not to disinclude people living in equatorial areas. But if winter gets as much light as summer this kind of D-vitamin pattern would not make sense. So even if we do not intend to and even if we are aware what is going on this kind of analog does disinclude equatorial people.
If you lived in constant shade then it could make sense to take D-vitamin both in summer and winter. In an important way the coffee is like vitamin-D for (some of) ADHD situations. So largely for “If so: cool.” indeed that way.
(stickler for possibility claims: If one thinks that AGI can make biological immortality and that meditation can lead to a working AGI scheme then meditation can lead to biological immortality (but I know what that passage gets at))
If standard lectures last for 2 hours and a anomalous lecture lasts for 4 hours and in the last hour nobody can follow anything, it tends to be that the diagnosis is that the lecture is too long. If a student can only pay attention for the first hour of a 2 hour lecture the diagnosis tends to be that the student is too impatient.
I would not say that if somebody has low muscle mass that their capacity to change their muscle mass is impaired (that there is some problem of them using a weightlifting gym). “Do you even lift?” implies that (all) humans should lift. Not everything is worth changing and possible to change. I don’t have great pointers on more neboulous feeling where I think others are based in their reactions. I know the thing was meant conditionally. But bits like
and
mean stuff. (if you leave your terms open then you can’t effectively say that you mean 0 of something. One risks meaning slightly bad stuff for vague terms. That can be an understandble tradeoff to make communication possible at all (or be at some required handiness bar))
I’m not interested in this branch of conversation. Just letting you know that I see this and am choosing not to continue the exchange.