I took one of his twitter polls where he asked a mathematical question. And the little Nasim shouting 'imbecile' worked in perfect symbiosis with the little Kahneman to engage System 2 and think about my answer.
There have been only a few things I have done with frequency in my life. Playing musical instruments in one of them. I have never been deliberate in practice. I have never sat down and made a schedule to practice playing the guitar or piano. But having a guitar always in visible line of sight has meant that I've practiced consistently everyday for years at a time so long as I have a guitar in the room.
Books don't have the ease of re-use. There's too much friction involved with a book. So I read whatever I please and give up frequently. Reducing this friction, in every domain, but especially in the sciences would have big impacts on my contributions to the field. If you could visualise and make learning slippery, ADHD people would likely perform much better. But the diligence is still needed. My musical ability has benefited enormously from knowing what I'm playing and recording the things I do play. The same thing can apply with learning. Technology can really shine at doing all of the boring stuff that your irregularly dopamine-ized brain refuses to do. We just havent gotten around to doing it. But it is necessary if you want to do great work.
Why don't books have that ease of re-use? I've currently got an open book on every available surface. Restart is just a matter of going there and grabbing it. (The most important ones sit on my desk)
For ones I've already read, they're in a shelf right behind me. Not line of sight, but a 180 degree turn. Same as my guitar. It works very well. (It took a while to get my partner used to books lying around everywhere, but it was worth it)
I agree 100% on the "line of sight" strategy being a really effective for developing music skills. I do the exact same myself. But I actually have had a bit of success with doing the same with books on a well-curated bookshelf in close proximity. It definitely works best for reference books, but almost anything that's a primary source works great for this. I often mark these books up with notes in margins, underlines, sometimes even sticky notes. If I have a lot to think about, I'll write that in a leuchterm notebook I keep on the same shelf, and just put the notebook page number in the book margins so I can go back later. When I go back to them - I'm not just able to build of of the original work, I'm able to build off of my own previous thoughts and easily recall my own situations where this applied. It's honestly really satisfying.
Some examples of books I keep going back to many times over and still find valuable as someone with ADHD:
- "The Art of War" by Sun Tzu - Any time I'm on any kind of competitive game kick or just thinking about competing in general, I always find something applicable to my situation. It's super short too.
- Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" - it's massive and not something I could ever read straight through - but it's so dense with interesting applications of a super simple concept (and great images of those applications), I can jump between the chapters and get something interesting to chew on every time.
- "The Federalist Papers", and also "The anti-federalist papers": They're great from a "oh, so this is why America is set up like this" perspective, and also from a "Let's see how close or off these guys were from predicting the future on specific topics! (ie, economic and social predictions mostly). I also like that the English used is not actually terribly hard to understand, despite being older.
- "Learn to Read New Testament Greek" - Really great smaller intro book to Koine greek with good exercises inline. Greek is one of those languages that shows up in so many places, that it's really satisfying to see it in historical perspective and then learn to recognize it elsewhere. This book also scratches some of my personal interests around the history of early christianity.
I also do the same process for some religious texts (New Testament and Nag Hammadi Scriptures).
Just as you said, things that require pure diligence don't usually work out for people with ADHD, but some books out there are straight up great for dopamine if you can find them. I think the core tings to look for are:
1. Super information dense yet still good for jumping around and digesting small pieces. You shouldn't have to re-learn the core premise every time.
2. Should feel different and novel when you come back to them after time away. Some of the greatest writers, especially philosopher-types, express ideas in an intentionally ambiguous way. They ensure that a part of their intended meaning is accessible to anybody on first read - but the more complete interpretation requires some degree of context and re-reading. A reader's interpretations of texts like that change and grow based on their own life experiences, and as a result it often feels like you are finding new things each time.
It's definitely a tricky issue. While we do need natural resources to support a transition to renewables, the mining industry is comically slow to move on anything. Fortran might still be considered cutting edge to some companies.
This has real impacts. Because if your resource models are inaccurate, then your environmental impact is magnified. What's worse is that mine lifecycles are very long. Long enough to mean the decision makers when opening a mine, might not be around when the mine closes. Which can cause carelessness, especially if they don't live in the area.
Stricter environmental impact assessment rules might work. But geo-scientific research is underfunded. So making it harder to open a mine, might cause the overall funding for research to reduce. Causing our models, especially in the mineral exploration stage, to not really advance much. So nothing really gets done until some country deregulates the industry, and so the problem persists.
So moves like this can work, but the research has to be there to support the new age of mining. There's some trade off here, between mining and burning fossil fuels. But this seems to be an example of where the negative effects of mining more REM are local, where as the negative effects of burning more Fossil fuels are global. But it's not a binary decision in most cases.
Morrowind: Dense, lot's of lore and immersion. More open, and less guided. I think at this time the cult of linear narrative was in it's infancy. And so you could kind of do more of what you wanted in Morrowind.
Oblivion: Brilliant for it's time in terms of world building, graphics and size. Famous for it's goofy elements, story line and characters. It still kept a lot of that attention to detail, but you could see it was starting to make tradeoffs.
IMO, As time has gone on, TES had traded size and grandeur for attention to detail, and Tolkien-esque world building. Skyrim was beautiful and a good continuation of the series. But it successfully struck a great balance between open world role playing, and commercial accessibility for audiences more accustomed to a single player linear narrative experience.
I'm too young to have played Daggerfall or Arena, so someone else would have to fill you in.
Arena took place in all of Tamriel. Cities were procedurally generated from a seed if I recall correctly, so they could have buildings in same locations across games, but cities were huge and filled with random people (like over a hundred buildibgs, some probably had specific structures). You could walk for hours between cities, because the land was also procedurally generated, but mostly flat. This was doable because the game looks like minecraft with a bigger block size.
It feels like a cross between a few features of a modern TES game and a rogue-like.
Brainstorming itself might be over-generalised or not fit for the individual in all cases. But Osborne was really focusing on methodical approaches to creativity. Which is something we don't know enough about. But my thoughts on this have been:
1) Creativity for some, means that you have to be maximally bought in on the problem or task. Ever had your mind go blank when having to come up with ideas for something you just don't care about? If I've ever had to focus on being creative on a field I just don't even marginally care about, my mind goes blank. When you care enough you'll be plenty creative. The brainstorm is a framework, which works ok in low interest, and quite well in high interest. But it's not the cause of the outcome in high interest situations. The interest is.
2) The types of people who are most creative tend to suffer most from high buy in cost. That is, they wont waste time on issues they don't care about. They wont do something unless they really enjoy it. If you ask an artist to sit down and to think of creative ways to reinvent accounting practices, she's going to tell you to piss off, or some other. Even just for one hour. But they'll put out again and again creative suggestions for things they find interesting. Unless He or She is bought in, creativity can be nullified by a lack of interest.
I've always had a soft spot for Venus. The floating city idea is not my favourite, perhaps for research there could be applications.
A monumental breakthrough in carbon sequestration, in method and cost might do it for Venus though. But I mean monumental. Back of the envelope calculations say there's about 460 Quadrillion metric tonne of CO2. Sooo, maybe at a cost 1c per metric tonne we could get it done with a current day cost of 4.6 Quadrillion US Dollars or so. Or all the worlds GDP for about 50 years. But that assumes that there would be no benefits from doing that. Could be other applications from the byproducts being sold.
it's always seemed to me that the serious problem with Venus is it's rotation speed. if it wasn't so slow I think you could turn it into a legitimately nice planet very long term. Mars on the other hand lacks the necessary macros, it's likely always going to be a rough place to live.
We ran a summer camp program for college students for several years. It started with 40 college students and each year we started adding more people. What was interesting was that each year believed that it's group size was perfect, and that any bigger would just be too big. They said that at 40, 70, 120, 300 and beyond. I've never been able to fully understand why that is. But the fact that you get that at hackathons, summer camps and incubators alike, is really cool
Not sure how immediately effective this is. But interest seems to prove there is a hugely underserved community of people with ADHD who could probably benefit from software tools to help deal with executive function deficits. But the best people to make the tools are those with adhd. And they tend to procrastinate making...
I think procrastination from ADHD effects is a really tiny part of it. Reasons for me not making ADHD tools or for my general symptoms so far in life:
1)I get tonnes of ideas to work on, far more than I could ever create. 99% of them aren't obviously anything to do with symptoms or ADHD at all. The projects that could help with ADHD have to compete for my time with ideas that solve some other thing I think of solving.
1b) there have been some problems that with hindsight where magnified because of poor working memory or other symptoms, but since I hadn't realised that's why they bothered me so much, I'd talk about them to other people and the ideas would be shot down or tweaked for mass-market usage. Since I want to solve problems, and get paid for it at some point, if I'm told "yeah that's just you, nobody else has that problem" it's easy to think "okay then, I'll move on to my next favourite idea even though I really want this one to exist".
2) it's hard to get non-adhd people to get excited by products that solve ADHD issues (needed if you want to do any kind of funding, even family and friends round). For starters ADHD is really badly misunderstood by the general population. Many symptoms look like we're not trying hard enough in some area of self care or organisation plus the acronym is straight up a terrible representation of the condition - it highlights only the most noticeable traits it shows as in young patients - not the areas that negatively effect people in working life. Also lots of big pain points for ADHD sufferers are felt to a much lesser extent by non-adhd, and so there are tools that are able to solve it for non-adhd but don't quite work for us. A quick look or even a bit of usage can make a tool look like it solves the problem when it really doesn't for us
Probably more reasons but this is getting long and I need to end this comment at some point
I've got quite a few of the symptoms, though not a full diagnosis yet. Am making TeaRounder.com which on the surface is about ordering drinks, but to me it's largely about ending an awkward part of normal life for me - forgetting lists in social moments that most people would be able to remember. I do wonder sometimes if it would be worth me just pursuing the ADHD and "chronically forgetful" side of it.
For the technical subjects, I haven't managed find a program more comprehensive as brilliant.org. It covers a great deal of the technical subjects to perhaps most of the undergraduate level of understanding.
I then supplement a course like brilliant, with udemy courses, guided project courses and then finally in to unguided personal projects. I can pass my CS exams, work full time, and not have to ever attend a lecture.
I only really decided to go to university to meet cool people and go to parties. There was a legitimate decision whether it was really worth it. Thankfully I live in a country where education is essentially affordable for a student, so I didn't stand to lose much.
My university has practically one of the biggest, most comprehensive libraries in the world. However, being an undergraduate, they don't actually allow me to borrow most of them, but a small sliver of 'undergraduate appropriate' books. But it's still extremely nice to be able to grab any book, free of charge and do some research. -> This is one of the main reasons I want to hang around in university.
Access to workshops, and labs is nearly always restricted to the people in the appropriate subjects. So I cant actually build anything physical, unless I belong to some mechanical engineering course. Figuring out a way to get around that would also be very nice for the future education system.
The tutor system in Oxford, Cambridge if it could be scaled, would be the final nail in the coffin for the traditional university. If I could get access to a person who is more knowledgable than me in a subject to help me understand what I don't know and give me pointers on what I probably need to learn would save me countless hours of just trying to know what I don't know.
