This is up there with the time that rationalists convinced themselves to get addicted to heroin for productivity or whatever.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34648499

EA appeals to exactly that kind of really-smart-person who is perfectly capable of convincing themselves that they're always right about everything. And from there, you can justify all kinds of terrible things.

I came to the same conclusion after a group of my friends got involved with the local rationalist and EA community, though for a different reason: Their drug habits.

They believed themselves to have a better grasp on human nature and behavior than the average person, and therefore believed they were better at controlling themselves. They also had a deep contrarian bias, which turned into a belief that drugs weren’t actually as bad as the system wanted us to believe.

Combine these two factors and they convinced themselves that they could harness recreational opioid use to improve their lives, but avoid the negative consequences that “normies” suffered by doing it wrong. I remember being at a party where several of them were explaining that they were on opioids right now and tried to use the fact that nothing terrible was happening as proof that they were performing rational drug use.

Long story short, the realities of recreational opioid use caught up with them and they were blind to the warning signs due to their hubris. I intentionally drifted away from that group around that time, so I don’t know what happened to them.

I will never forget how confident they were that addiction is something that only happens to other people, not rationalists like them.

Shit like this is exactly why I'm skeptical of FTX boy's Adderall prescription.

What about addiction risk?

The data on this are really poor because it’s hard to define addiction. If a prescription stimulant user uses their stimulants every day, and feels really good on them, and feels really upset if they can’t get them…well, that’s basically the expected outcome.

did I just watch Scott try to reply guy addiction out of existence?

also, all the paragraphs Scott uses to call his patients liars and insinuate that other psychiatrists have guilty consciences are really uncomfy? cause it really feels like a normal response to the situations he’s describing is “boy I’m getting a lot of folks with ADHD and neurodivergent traits and all they seem to want is one treatment for it, maybe I should examine that more closely” and not “look at all these normal-brained fucks with intense problems focusing coming to me for drugs, which I’m certain the other pill-pushers in my industry will give them without question. welp time to not even attempt to establish a therapeutic dosage or even guidelines around how much to take since this is a fun safe party drug”

Also I should point out claims around micro-dosing psychedelics are actually pretty sketch…and some of these people claim daily use of lsd - which is impossible (due to receptors getting flooded).

This was definitely written on an adderall bender.

As the rare person who is both fully convinced that ADHD is real/treated successfully with stims but who also has decided not to use them anymore, I feel called out.

This article is overly long and not sufficiently informed by the history of stimulant use and ADHD diagnosis, and instead tries to derive history from first principles. I read it a long time ago and I ain't reading it again because fuck that.

If you want a good accounting of the 'what if we're overdiagnosing ADHD' argument, ADHD nation is much better researched than Scott's post, and dives into the history of ADHD as a diagnosis and the era of stimulant use before it was as tightly controlled a substance. l don't endorse it's conclusions, but if you want a background on the topic, it's better than whatever this is.

There's a schism in the online disability rights community between people who favor an extreme flavor of the social model (somewhat advocated in Scott's 'man was not made to program or account' argument) and people who are very adamant that they have an intrinsic disability which must be medicalized.

I think both are a symptom of just how common the diagnosis is and what a wide swath of human behavior it covers, but I'm not sure that's all. My sibling and I both have an ADHD dx and scrip; my sibling still takes it and is basically non-functional without it; I have instead adapted my life to avoid a total lack of executive function creating too many issues.* I do not require stimulants to program for hours, but my sibling has difficulty focusing even with the aid of stimulants. I was diagnosed earlier because I was a rambunctious boy and she was a girl so when she couldn't focus on math class, the way she tells it, they just shrugged and assumed she was bad at math.

• Posting a lot notwithstanding