> One way to illustrate this is to use a computer analogy: in a way, my CPU runs at a higher frequency, which has allowed me to emulate with software the hardware that I'm missing.
I'm convinced that there is something here.
One notable thing out of my childhood is dyslexia. It has taken some things away from me. Some of which I've figured out the 'emulator' for (handwriting, spelling). I'm still working on other things (messiness, forgetfulness).
However, for as much as it has taken away it has also given. I'm absurdly good at solving incredibly complex problems (both logical and sociological) and good at making fast high quality decisions. I think the reason is simple: most people naturally see "J" and "T" as different things, I struggle to do the same. That being said, while many people see two problems as different things, I can see the similarity: solving N problems with 1 solution. Another dyslexic once called it "intuitive reflection and rotation" - a name that I strongly agree with; the dyslexic mind automatically reflects and rotates both images AND concepts.
I strongly believe that many (likely not all) learning 'disabilities' are not actually disabilities. They are merely trade-offs. Children who have these 'conditions' should really learn how to capitalize on their unique abilities instead of being told that and treated like they are mentally disabled. So the kid can't spell, who cares?
I can't agree with you more on this. All these labelings do not reflect the true nature of how things are, and they are often generalizations. Different brains process information differently. So I much prefer the term "learning differences" instead of using words like "disabilities" or "disorders" since right now we still do not quite yet understand exactly how the brain works.
I have had a very similar experience with my learning 'disabilities.' They are only disabilities within the incredibly narrow system of teaching techniques that are commonly used during childhood education because they work 100% of the time for 60% of the students (think whole reading method). It turns out that outside childhood education there are a huge number of other ways to teach and learn and the brains that learn differently seem to have enormous advantages when it comes to finding underlying similarities between apparently different things.
You are lucky. There are plenty of people with learning disabilities and no such obvious upsides. I think your case is the exception, rather than the rule.
I always thought the terms disabled or disorder were only used in cases where the person is not able to function without problems in whatever environment or society they are in. You can have tons of differences from other people, but until it actually gets to the point where you can't function on a day to day basis without some help I wouldn't call it a disability or a disorder.
Really? Do you have some examples? What are these disabilities measured against other than the "norm"? Some of the most learning challenged I've known were incredible streetwise for an example.
I'm sitting here writing this from a conference about the genetic disease one of my children has. He's lucky... he's of above average intelligence even on a normal scale. Many of his fellow disease sufferers are confined to a wheelchair, unable to speak even in their teens, and literally the only motions they make on their own is some vague twitching motions.
Yes, there is a such thing as true, uncompensated disability, and you should thank your lucky stars that you live a life where you could even entertain the notion that there is no such thing as "disabilities". Tone note: I mean that straight, not angry or something... be thankful. It's a hard thing for all involved.
That needed to be said. Thank you, jerf, I couldn't have said it better. I am sick and tired of people romanticising disabilities, or even worse, denying their existence. I am not surprised that some people on Hackernews are secluded enough that they can delude themselves into thinking that disability is always a tradeoff and the disabled must be a genius in some way.
That may be a selection bias. You just don't hang out with people with severe disabilities as much. Maybe they just stay home, with a family member to look after them. Some of them are in institutions, cared by professionals.
A learning challenged person who was not streetwise would probably stay away from the streets.
>You just don't hang out with people with severe disabilities as much. Maybe they just stay home, with a family member to look after them. Some of them are in institutions, cared by professionals.
And some of them have already chosen to not be part of this world anymore. It is often called a permanent solution to a temporary problem, but some problems are just as permanent.
Interestingly, I feel the same way about my ADHD. I distinctly remember a Calculus test in which I learned what I was supposed to have learned through study and in class (neither of which I cared for or participated in) by looking at the context of several questions and answers and reverse engineering the process without having been taught it (or without having paid attention to the teaching). My grades weren't great, but my test scores kept me afloat.
And now that I program, I do so very differently than most people, but there are times when I'm in my stride (for example, pitching to investors or juggling the pieces of managing a team) where I feel at home. Like no one can touch me.
>And now that I program, I do so very differently than most people, but there are times when I'm in my stride (for example, pitching to investors or juggling the pieces of managing a team) where I feel at home. Like no one can touch me.
Be careful with that -- Adult ADHD is often accompanied with delusions of grandeur. I say this from personal experience: I'll have a great idea and think it's the most awesome thing in the world, and my friends are kind of "meh". A few days later, I look back on it and say "What was I thinking?" ADHD can give you a false sense of security / accomplishment in the moment, so always be sure to get someone else to check your work. You may come up with some elegant, awesome hack to fix something... only to find there was an API in a library you already use that does the exact same thing and you just missed it in the documentation because you were so "hyperfocused" (another hallmark of adult ADHD) on fixing the problem.
That said, it can also be a great asset: an ADHD person who is in one of these "zones" can be incredibly inspirational to a team. Irrational confidence isn't always a bad thing if you're staring down a tough deadline and need to motivate your team. Just be careful you're not making an idiot out of yourself too often :)
The grandeur is very real; I'm not sure what of that comes with ADHD and what just comes with the territory of running a startup.
One day you're taking over the world, one day you're totally fucked. I've actually been tracking my mood at the beginning, middle, and end of each day along with our metrics and any other thing that could sway my moods.
My conclusion is that my mood swings are completely, 100% irrational. I try to temper them on both sides. When I feel like we're taking over the world, it's a good time to talk to investors/do sales stuff. When I'm completely depressed, it's a good time to focus on all of the things that are broken with the product.
I don't know if that's ideal, but I think it's working? Who knows.
You are thinking like a mathematician. When we are kids we are taught that math involves memorizing algorithms and formulas but when you get up to big-boy math you realize that no one can memorize all that shit, but if you are familiar with the territory of math you can figure out the parts you're missing; and only familiarity with the territory lets you generate new proofs, conjectures, and applications. Unfortunately educators confuse "memorizing facts and formulas" with "becoming familiar with the territory" because it seemed to work so well teaching grade schoolers how to use the four basic arithmetic operators.
Thats a feeling I'm familiar with, I could never remember the formulas, but I could remember the steps to derive the formulas from what was on the page and the basic equations-It's not too different from stream of consciousness vs planned writing.
Your description of dyslexia is fascinating. Thank you for sharing that. I can't say it enough; I absolutely love reading that kind of personal account of people whose minds function in a unique way.
Children who have these 'conditions' should really
learn how to capitalize on their unique abilities
instead of being told that and treated like they are
mentally disabled.
Sometimes I'm glad that ADHD wasn't a recognized thing when I was in school. If I'd been told that there was something wrong with me, would I have worked so hard to overcome those shortcomings and come up with alternate coping tools? In a way, it was good training for "real life" because real life sure doesn't care if you have a learning or behavioral disability.
On the other hand, god damn. I sure spent a lot of time thinking I was "lazy, stupid, or crazy." That... that was not fun.
I totally agree with you. We should recognize those differences in kids and focus on finding their other gifts, while helping them to find alternate strategies to do the necessary things in life that can't be avoided. Like, even if your kid has dyslexia he's going to have to file taxes and read warning labels someday.
> Sometimes I'm glad that ADHD wasn't a recognized thing when I was in school. If I'd been told that there was something wrong with me, would I have worked so hard to overcome those shortcomings and come up with alternate coping tools?
This is why I've never been formally tested for autism/Aspergers, despite being assured by various people that I would be on the spectrum. I did the same as the OP, manually making mental catalogs of facial expressions and closely watching people for cues to behavior. If I had been labelled I think my first instinct would have been to be lazy and say "Well, there's something wrong with me, can't do anything about it."
The main coping tools are probably exactly the same as they are for anybody else, actually - just the stakes are higher for those with ADHD!
- Proper sleep. Probably the biggest single factor. I don't always excel at this. When I don't get enough sleep nearly everything else is moot.
- Proper environment. The exact definition of "proper" will be quite different for everybody, of course. Pay attention to what works, and don't be afraid to suggest alternate arrangements to your manager. You don't have to mention ADHD ever - just mention the facts ("I'm having a tough time focusing in the noisy part of the office") and provide a constructive suggestion ("Is it okay if I work alone in the unused meeting room when the noise at my desk is too distracting?")
- Proper diet. Another thing I'm not great at. But foods that cause sugar spikes and crashes make it hard to focus for anybody, especially me.
- Exercise. Really, really helps. (True for anybody, of course!)
- Lists. The key, as I learned from Getting Things Done, is that no task should be more than 10-15 minutes. If so it should be broken down into smaller tasks. Additionally, you must review/prune your list regularly so it doesn't turn into a big failure/guilt pile.
- Medication. It helps. For me it's only maybe 25% of the puzzle or so and can be rendered moot if I'm in a distracting environment or am running on no sleep.
Medication is one tool. (This includes other stimulants such as caffeine which some ADHD people self-medicate with.) No tool is sufficient in isolation, though - different people need different sets of tools. Here's a book I've found helpful in presenting a bunch of different tools: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0415815894
Social support, using todo lists, lots and lots of effort to establish habits, so you can stop spending so much daily effort (CPU) on things that most people can handle with GPU.
In addition to medication, like mkopinsky said, I've had great success keeping a Bullet Journal[0]. It keeps me on track day to day, but medication keeps me on track minute to minute. I definitely spent a lot of time in college (years before I was diagnosed) trying different productivity methods and tools, but nothing would stick past a week.
I'm on the autistic spectrum, and "emulation" is exactly how I'd describe my social interactions as well. It always feels like I'm trying to emulate floating-point arithmetic on a CPU without hard float support. It kinda works if you can do a lot of integer operations quickly. But unless the emulator is really good, you'll get all sorts of rounding errors.
In some ways, I've even gotten a little too good at emulating some types of interactions. I'm still lousy at realtime verbal communication, but when it comes to written communication, I can catch all sorts of nuances and unstated assumptions that ordinary people often miss. It's one of those cases when an emulator or hypervisor outperforms bare metal under some workloads. Since my emulator is so lousy at verbal communication, I've optimized the shit out of it for written communication.
At the end of the day, though, all this heavy emulation takes a toll. My brain burns a lot more cycles (calories?) running the emulator all day long and rapidly context-switching in and out of it. It makes me exhausted after a few hours. I wish our society was organized in such a way that I wouldn't need to spin up my emulator so often.
I can really relate. A lot of the time I'm seen as quiet during verbal conversations, and it's confusing to me because I feel like I'm just being polite and listening to what people are saying. I've gotten better at it, but I've had to put a lot of work into doing so. I used to be called "shy" a lot.
On the other hand, because I've spent so much time figuring out how to talk to people (it's an important life and business skill) I am very good at expressing things clearly. I can see miscommunication a lot faster, and with written word I can -really- pick up on the nuances. I think it's because I've spent so many years having to figure out how people think and how they came to say the words they're saying. I have to think through every step so I can empathize better. Constantly putting myself in their shoes.
But like you said it can be exhausting. Not only am I figuring out what I want to say, but I'm trying to emulate the reasons they are saying what they are saying.
Yeah, it annoys me when people say that those on the autistic spectrum "don't have a theory of mind". I have an excellent theory of mind, thank you very much. I'm just not very good at applying it in real time, because it's implemented in a rather slow language :p
If we had a society that would tolerate it and help the kid capitalize on it, then no one should care. But we have a society that doesn't, so the kid will be hurt by it. For dyslexia, it might not take a major change. Use fonts that work better. Not care as much about spelling and focus on their own talents. Allow them access to a spell checker. Stop using the same metric to measure their performance.
But if you take someone on the autism spectrum, the level of change needed so they won't be hurt by it seems like it would require a miracle somewhere on the scale between bringing back Elvis and world peace.
We can help them cope, we can help them leverage their advantages. But give our current society, there are some differences that are going to cause a lot of hurt and pain, both while growing and once they are adults. In those cases, anyone who cares about the kid should care.
I think you slightly misunderstood the GPs point: we should care about the dangers, but we should teach them to autistic children in concepts and ways they understand, and focus on teaching them how to emulate those behaviors, rather than saying that they're broken because they're missing it at the hardware level.
Why shouldn't the spellchecker be to dyslexic kids what canes are to people who have trouble walking -- an accepted solution to the problem, rather than shouting they should walk better. Well duh! They already want to walk better.
I don't disagree with GP on making life better. I'm suggesting that in some cases they are broken to an extent that even with emulation they will not reach normal functioning. A person may gain more mobility while using a cane, but we still put elevator requirements into building codes because we realize that not everyone is going to be able to use the stairs. But for some people, even with the 'canes' and 'elevators' we have available, there will be areas they can't get to, some which may be really critical.
The person shouting to walk better is an idiot only making their lives worse; we can all agree to that. But what of the people who think a cane is good enough and elevators aren't needed? Or those who think that elevators and canes are enough? When someone can't walk well, we should still care. Because even with all the canes and all the elevators, even with leveraging all the benefits their condition may give them, there are still things they don't have access to, and sometimes those can be quite critical parts of life cut off from them. So we should still care.
> I strongly believe that many (likely not all) learning 'disabilities' are not actually disabilities
Thanks... this is actually really hard to explain to people and I am very glad that some people actually get it.
I've been trying to explain several times that even the term disease (often used along with disability) is not appropiated to describe autism, but I have had little luck with that.
> Another dyslexic once called it "intuitive reflection and rotation" - a name that I strongly agree with; the dyslexic mind automatically reflects and rotates both images AND concepts.
This is really fascinating, I never though about dyslexia being generalized to behavior outside of spelling/reading/writing. It's interesting to think about other disabilities or cognitive behaviors that are made apparent in one specific way, and generalizing them outward to other situations.
The brain (the tissue) is not the "hardware", with it's "contents" being the software. I'd say that the analogy makes no sense. Whatever you can "emulate", you're emulating because you've got the "hardware" to do it.
To illustrate my point: we can't emulate perceiving time at a much slower pace or viewing a wider spectrum of light. Okay, that's a wrong example since we're limited by our eyes - the peripherals/sensing devices. Perhaps try emulating interpreting visible light as a color blind person would.
The separation between hardware (brain) and software (soul?) is practically non-existent. It's closer to a state-machine.
That's sort of a nitpick on the analogy I think. There might not be much of a hardware/software distinction in the brain but there is a distinction between processes that are not conscious, that seemingly take place automatically and effortlessly, and processes that are conscious, that seem to be effortful, deliberate, that require focus. I think that's the distinction that the analogy is going for -- the emulation going on is patching up some failures to do automatic effortless work by doing deliberate, focused, effortful work.
Yes, precisely. As an example, much of human communication is non-verbal and automatic. You're picking up on various queues, body language, there's a flow to it and all of it is subconscious.
If the machinery that does all of that is missing, broken, or functions poorly, you end up with an individual who has difficulty communicating well. He can speak, is intelligent, but seems absolutely daft when it comes to social interactions.
The general response of such individuals is to use the parts that work well to reach a reasonable outcome. For example, that persons' memory might be excellent. So that person memorizes hundreds of social interactions, recalls the specific one he happens to be in, and presses the play button on the recording.
The result isn't perfect. It's sluggish. Kind of like emulating software on hardware it was never meant to run on (hence, the analogy). But it works and certainly works better than nothing.
I think there can still be "emulation". For instance, when I was in elementary school I thought it was hard to remember the full multiplication table. Instead of remembering 7×9 I would think 7×10-7 = 63. That's IMHO a type of algorithm (software) of breaking down the multiplication so it requires less rote memorization (emulation).
I can give you another example. When I first had to learn what was my left and right hand, I instead visualized that I sat on a particular chair in a particular room. Then the window would be to the left, so the hand closest to the window would be the left hand. IMHO, also an emulation.
(Edit - In the second example, I visualized myself in a 3rd party perspective, so it also involved rotating the room in my head. My problem was that I couldn't apply left and right to myself at that age, only relative to other things)
I'm not dyslexic, but I still have a hellish time with left and right. I finally had to "logic out" that when I look in the rear-view mirror, left is left and right is right (when seeing the turn signals of the person behind me). Still can't solve 3-D puzzles ("which of these diagrams is the same as this one") worth a damn.
Hardware: Closer to autonomous functions. Require no thought, you just do it. Example: Saying "Thank you" reflexively when someone does something kind.
Software: Have to mentally process the situation. Did this person do something kind? Is there a response I should give? Oh! "Thank you!"
Still a false dichotomy. Everything we do runs the gamut from autonomous to executive. For instance, a relatively illiterate person will have to focus purposefully in order to read a street sign, whereas your average literate person will look at a street sign while holding 7 other things in his mind at the same time.
I think a better analogy are those processor flags found in /proc/cpuinfo in Linux systems.
If your processor doesn't have the vmx or the svm flags, for example, you can't use hardware virtualization but can still use software virtualization in its place, with a performance cost.
I see how the mind and body could be seen as a state machine, since there's a strong connection that flows both ways, but there's really only so much that the mind can do to change the body. Try thinking yourself strong enough to lift a horse... So I think the analogy works in the rough, but can actually be taken further. We have parts of our mind/body "stack" that are able to operate and change on all time scales and levels of persistence.
You can change your body (to a degree) through surgery or slow habit - (hardware / firmware); you can change your prevailing mood, knowledge, and skills through slow habit (again, only to a degree) - firmware; there seems to be a level of chemical mood or emotion that changes on the time scale of minutes or hours - disk persistence; you can change what you're thinking about and your current state of mind in a minute or so - memory; and you can react to your immediate objects of focus very quickly - cache.
I agree that calling it a disability is not right. It's a difference, it might make certain things more challenging, but a disability carries tones of uselessness.
The thing is I also don't think it can be thought of as a trade-off. There's no great balancing factor. I see people who expect every autistic person to be some kind of savant like the Rain Man. You don't automatically get some bonus somewhere else to cancel out the issues you have.
What you do get is a different perspective. You have to learn to cope, and in learning to cope, you learn to do things differently than anyone else might have had to. It's not because nature has somehow compensated you for what it took away, but because you simply had a different experience which forced you to learn differently.
I've got a different issue than dyslexia. I've got an attention deficit issue. There's nothing really 'good' about it, but there's a few things about it. One is that in learning to cope with it I've become very aware of my emotional state, about my motivation and stress, and how they impact my ability to focus. I've kind of come to an understanding that's hard to describe of 'why' this happens to me (in short, I run through my ability to focus very quickly, and it recovers relatively slowly, so I can focus very intensely for long while, but doing so might make me useless for a week. I'm normally living in a deficit because day to day it's hard for me to avoid spending more focus than I recover).
In that I've learned a little about how I function, how and why other people act certain ways, how to have a ton of patience and why it's really important to have downtime (for everyone, but especially for me), how to offload decision-making tasks.
And despite all of that, I still have the same challenges. I mean, I don't have full control over how much stress I'll encounter or how much I'll end up focusing and making decisions in a day. I can try to do things to limit them, but that still happens regardless.
But I gained a perspective that other people don't have, and I care about things that other people prefer to just joke about. I just happen to see things in a different way than the majority and it's important, but it's not a tradeoff, it's a consequence of this difficulty, and the fact that I'm not willing to just say "Hey, I'm disabled, I'm not responsible for myself." It's more like, "Yeah, I have this challenge, I've done this to overcome it. I still have problems doing these things, so I try to avoid having to do those things."
Other people could totally learn the same things that I have, but they just haven't been put in the position to be required to do self-reflection to get through the day.
Similarly, the things you learned because you were dyslexic might be things that other people could totally learn to do, the difference is you've ended up having to do them to get by.
It's like two kids growing up, one kid is forced to carry 30 lb weights as he walks to school. The other kid can get to school however he wants. The result of the kid who carries weights is that he will get stronger. But it's hardly a tradeoff, he's in a situation where he's forced to carry those weights whether he wants to or not, he's not getting anything in return, except the consequences of carrying those weights.
The kid who can ride the bus to school could carry weights instead, however, it's highly unlikely anyone would choose to put themselves through that much difficulty when they could avoid it. So you'd probably end up being stronger than him, but on the other hand, he could go to the gym and train and rest properly, while you're forced to carry those weights whether you want to or not.
I'm just saying there isn't some balance. But we're just forced to cope with things that other people don't have to. This gives us a unique perspective, but not necessarily an exclusive or even balancing factor.
Dyslexia on it's own doesn't give you the ability to do those things. However, it pressures you to learn those things in order to cope with the fact that you can't do it the easy way. There's no unique ability about Dyslexia itself that you could really capitalize on in that respect, but there are things you have definitely learned to do that you can capitalize on because of Dyslexia.
I don't think we should worry about trade offs. I think we should learn about what people can and can't do and why that's important. I agree, if the kid can't spell, it shouldn't be a problem if they can make themselves understood.
However, our pedagogical system is such that we want to offer one curriculum for many people. Writing happens to be a big part of that, and it's hard to measure aptitude when you're struggling to write. We also really love testing, and spelling errors are a really easy thing to grade. It doesn't really matter what we should have, certain issues are going to continue to stand out until we fundamentally change how we teach. And I don't mean relax our standards, I mean each child would have to be taught to their own capacity individually, and that's currently unreasonable.
I'm convinced that there is something here.
One notable thing out of my childhood is dyslexia. It has taken some things away from me. Some of which I've figured out the 'emulator' for (handwriting, spelling). I'm still working on other things (messiness, forgetfulness).
However, for as much as it has taken away it has also given. I'm absurdly good at solving incredibly complex problems (both logical and sociological) and good at making fast high quality decisions. I think the reason is simple: most people naturally see "J" and "T" as different things, I struggle to do the same. That being said, while many people see two problems as different things, I can see the similarity: solving N problems with 1 solution. Another dyslexic once called it "intuitive reflection and rotation" - a name that I strongly agree with; the dyslexic mind automatically reflects and rotates both images AND concepts.
I strongly believe that many (likely not all) learning 'disabilities' are not actually disabilities. They are merely trade-offs. Children who have these 'conditions' should really learn how to capitalize on their unique abilities instead of being told that and treated like they are mentally disabled. So the kid can't spell, who cares?