As a second data point, my thought process was pretty similar to Claire’s—I didn’t really consider medication until reading Rob’s post because I didn’t think I was capital D depressed, and I’m really glad now that I changed my mind about trying it for mild depression. I personally haven’t had any negative side effects from Wellbutrin, although some of my friends have.
lynettebye
I find it useful to stagger asking for advice, roughly from easy to hard to access. E.g. if I can casually chat with a housemate about a decision when I just need a sounding board, I’ll start there. Once I have more developed ideas, I’ll reach out to the harder to access people, e.g. experts on the topic or more senior people who I don’t want to bother with lots of questions.
Do you know what the landscape is of people working on this now, and whether any of them are doing it in an EA-ish way?
Seconding that the risk of harmful interventions is low. Based on Scott’s pages and the UpToDate page, the risks from taking stimulant medication as prescribed are pretty negligible—comparable to normal side effects from caffeine.
I just finished revamping the Mental Health Navigator’s community-recommended provider database, and I’m really hopeful that this will help a bunch of EAs find therapists. (It will be promoted later this fall) https://www.eamentalhealthnavigator.com/recommended-providers
A few quick meta comments: It feels like this level of polish is sufficient for getting some people to read the post to begin with. The alternative would be to put a lot of time into creating an engaging, compelling post building your idea, but I don’t actually have a good sense of how much better that would be than simple, conversational tone and brevity you used. The epistemic status note at the top was helpful.
On the other hand, I suspect that almost none of your readers will actually do anything based on this. You probably want to put more effort into making the suggested action easy and compelling if you want to get people to do something.
On net, I vote for more quick posts like this.
I wish we didn’t need to treat ADHD like a disease, and instead people could just say “yes, I struggle more along these dimensions that the average person.” Unfortunately, the medical community treats ADHD as a disease and has drawn arbitrary, frustratingly vague guidelines around it. If someone wants to access medication, they need to accept that label.
My best understanding is that ADHD symptoms are roughly normally distributed in the population. I would be thrilled if the medical community followed an informed consent model where patients could decide for themselves if they needed medication, following proper advisement of the risks and costs. Baring that, it would be great if they established clearer thresholds for what was significant enough impairment to be worth medicating, instead of the current system.
I find the DSM-V criteria aggravatingly vague and non-specific. Like “Six or more symptoms of inattention for children up to age 16 years, or five or more for adolescents age 17 years and older and adults; symptoms of inattention have been present for at least 6 months.” I.e. adults who say “often” or “very often” more than 5 times on a questionnaire get diagnosed with ADHD. How often if “often”? You know, often!
What’s a skill you have spent deliberate effort in developing that has paid off a lot? Or alternatively, what is a skill you wish you had spent deliberate effort developing much earlier than you did?
I hear the vague umbrella term “good judgement” or even more simply “thinking well” thrown around a lot in the EA community. Do you have thoughts on how to cultivate good judgement? Did you do anything—deliberately or otherwise—to develop better judgement?
For you personally, do you think that loving what you do is correlated with or necessary for doing it really well?
So, that example looks like an example of time pressure, rather than just being aware of time.
My understanding is that the literature on time pressure is considerably more nuanced and interesting. At its simplest, increased pressure (e.g. tight deadlines or expectation of evaluation) seem to improve performance on tasks where it’s clear exactly what needs to be done. On tasks that require creativity or novel problem solving, pressure seems to reduce performance compared to low to moderate time pressure. E.g. Ted Talk and study. I haven’t actually looked at this since college, so I can send you the dozen or so other papers I read then if you want to look at it with fresh eyes.
From that, I would expect your concern to be accurate only some of the time, albeit for some important work.
On the other hand, I have several anecdotal data points that regular time tracking is valuable for improving prioritization, though I expect the return is more varied than for short periods of time. I expect time tracking to be extremely valuable for short time spans (about 2 weeks) as a sanity check/improving knowledge of where time is spent.
Additionally, I expect people to be pretty bad at estimating productive time without tracking their time, hence the concern that prompted my original comment. The data means less if people are highly inaccurate when estimating time.
Last year, I looked at some studies to try understanding how correlated self-reported and objective measures are. There was a wide variance, with generally low to moderate correlations. When I looked just at the couple data points that are easily and/or frequently measured, the correlation was much higher, above r=0.7. Things that aren’t frequently measured have average correlations closer to r=0.3. Here’s that data if you want to reexamine it:
For numbers that were not frequently measured, the correlation between self-reported and directly measured was moderate: for one meta-analysis on physical activity, the mean r coefficient = 0.37 (range −0.71 to 0.96); for various measures of ability, mean r = 0.29 (range −0.6 to 0.80); for sedentary time, r<0.31; for physical activity, r=0.11.
A few more studies reported r coefficient ranges, but not mean r: for another measure of sedentary time, the coefficients ranged from 0.02 to 0.36; for another study on physical activity, the coefficients ranged from 0.46 to 0.53 (p value did not meet .05 threshold); for various other measures of sedentary time, the coefficients ranged from 0.50 to 0.65. If these are included in the above graph, the mean R goes up closer to .33.
For numbers that are frequently measured, the correlation between self-reported and directly measured was noticeably higher: for course grades, median r = .76 (range.70 to .84); for height and weight, median r = .94 (range .90 and above). This mildly sketchy unpublished review of hundreds of comparisons found an average of 85% perfect match between self-reports and objective records. The examples they give (e.g. self-report of hospitalizations or how many ambulatory physician visits compared with medical records) range from 89% to 100% exact match, and are mostly more frequently/easily measured.
Note: the mental health navigator doesn’t just focus on free or low-cost mental health resources. They provide links to free/low cost online resources, plus a providers database of coaches, therapists, and psychiatrists recommended by EAs.
Can we add EA Mental Health Navigator, especially the provider database? It’s a list of coaches and therapists recommended by EAs. It is available as a resource, and would also benefit from more people leaving reviews of providers they’ve worked with!
Haha, same! My reaction to reading Luisa’s post was “Ohh, wait, perfectionism is spending time inefficiently because I don’t want to stopping working on one task until I think it’s good?” Calling this “perfectionism” feels a bit misleading: from the inside it never felt like I was trying to make something perfect, just meeting an (admittedly high) bar for “good enough.”
Emily was great to work with to get it all done and out :)
What is your process for deciding your high-level goals? What role does explicit prioritization play? What role does gut-level/curiosity-/intuition-driven prioritization play?
Do you (or did you) ever have doubts about whether you were “good enough” to pursue your career?
(Sorry for posting after the deadline—I haven’t been on screens recently due to a migraine and just saw it.)
The biggest expenses are costs typically paid by the employer separately from salary (e.g. self-employment taxes and health insurance together are about $16,000). The next largest is outsourcing some work to help me scale coaching.
I average about 13 calls a week (which works out to about $80,000 a year), and about 40% of total revenue goes to business expenses (which leaves a salary of <$50,000).
I appreciated this. I really want EA to understand its problems and deal with them, but that’s not going to happen if everyone is starting with an agenda. I value someone going in with a truth seeking goal to understand the situation.