#for more about neural precision you could look at predictive coding on wikipedia

[cthulhubert]

I've long thought something similar, and Scott Alexander has a really neat little discussion of it in this post: Ontology of Psychiatric Conditions, where he introduced me to the great vocabulary word "Taxonic".

He talks about a couple papers on taxometrics of psychiatric conditions, which have fairly different conclusions.

But like, even Schizophrenia, which really seems like it should be taxonic (I mean, you either have auditory hallucinations or you don't), has related schizotypal diagnoses.

Scott makes a metaphor about the power distribution of wealth (ie, the uber-wealthy may "merely" have a lot more dollars in their net worth than average, but that difference is extreme enough it means they live very different lives from most of humanity). But one I really like is height. If I were to start shrinking, I could quantify eg, how hard it is to shop for clothes, or how frequently I need to use a step stool; but once I'm to a certain point, I need to pay a lot extra for all kinds of specialized or custom clothes or goods, nearly every counter (not specifically built for me) is so high I'd get shoulder RSI without a constantly present stool, etc. I think autism spectrum disorders are this at an extremely high point of "neural precision", and ADHD is probably something similar (though "attention" isn't really a rigorously coherent measure, it's obviously downstream of something more much more specific like reward-center-frontal-lobe-bandwidth or something else that neatly slices reality at a joint we don't even see yet, much like "neural precision" seems to make a lot of ASD symptoms fall into a neat line that we couldn't easily talk about before).

Of course, then there's the comparison with achondroplasia. Among the people who are significantly shorter than average, it's usually because they have some disorder that has shortness among its symptoms, but it also causes other symptoms. I would be willing to bet there's a couple specific disorders that strongly affect our underlying-measure-of-which-"attention"-is-a-roughly-correlated-side-effect, and also cause other problems we see in our ADHD-symptoms-have-a-significant-impact-on-my-quality-of-life people (vs the people that merely could benefit from more use of a "stool"(stimulants). (This also gives us a neat metaphor of people that lose focus or become manic when they take stimulants: people that step on a stool and get clipped in the head by a ceiling fan)).

what are you a truther about re: adhd specifically?

i mean theres just tons and tons of weakly-supported "infomation" about ADHD online. one big thing is like, the whole rejection sensitive dysphoria thing, which seems very weakly evidenced, i can find two studies, both fairly small (one 40 people, one 200, which is much better), but both of those are about emotional dysregulation rather than RSD, and in general it would take a lot to sway me from a model where ADHD is less well understood as anything like a discrete disorder and more just being particularly low on a normal distribution of attention