It's lesswrong. Those folks are just blogging masquerading as technical hypotheses and "published" (as in, self published on a glorified social media site) "science".

Scientology vibes over there. You can safely disregard most of it.

It's not all bad. I've read some interesting explorations in morality there.

No, but Sturgeon’s law applies, no matter how much LessWrong convinced itself it doesn’t.

When or how did you decide to take something vs what was happening before?

I’ve done lots of therapy work. Systemizing and structuring things. Definitely helpful.

But sometimes I just feel wired (this way) and wonder if chemically rewiring is the real answer. Rather than willpower, talking, and trying to adress the “root cause” over a prescription.

Stay away from Schedule 2. Just stay the fuck away. If it was mitigable by non-pharma means, do that. Because once you're on Schedule 2, you're basically tethered to a physician and pharmacy in your State of residence, and your insurer will make your life miserable. Further you will be locked out of many rewarding avenues of life just because the logistics involved.

Nevermind the fact that you will start completely losing any appreciation for non-medicated people's rate of throughput. Lifetime of experience and hard learned lessons speaking here.

Interesting. The person I replied to had the opposite opinion. The only answer for them, it seemed.

Care to share a bit of the detail behind this very pointed response? Thanks so much for it.

Amen. It's also hard for me to take someone seriously if they say "Do this thing, er wait, don't."

Yeah, taking adderall for the first time was a LOT like the first time I put on glasses. I never knew what it was like to be functional before that. There were deficits in every area of my life. From the obvious like focusing on work/school stuff (wish I’d found out before taking 6 years to get a BA), to stuff that completely surprised me (my handwriting improved, and I no longer have ZERO sense of direction).

Same… there is tons of research on ADHD showing stimulants are safe and effective long term. I suffered needlessly for years because of ignorant ideas like this… and using medication was life changing.

Counter-intuitively there is data showing medications can help people develop better executive function- children who use ADHD medication are less likely to have adult ADHD.

That said, I think the core advice of this article is excellent- and addresses something entirely different than ADHD medication.

The problem is most stimulants subtly fuck with your reward and risk processing circuitry, and you don't tend to even realize it until you get clean for a hot minute, which is hard if you've been on a high dose. Especially if you don't know what you're in for, and doubly so if you've been on the same dosage for a long time.

Shit ain't magic.

It’s not “magic” but it can be an effective treatment for ADHD - for the people it works for, which isn’t everyone.

Personally, I think a lot of people with ADHD are way over medicated, leading to the type of symptoms you describe. If you take the lowest effective dose of the most mild stimulant that works for you, it will probably not work quite as well but will also not have any side effects at all. Ritalin is usually much milder than e.g. adderall, and I think most people would do better on extremely low doses of it- like 5-15mg spread out over an entire day for a large adult, whereas people tend to start on 2x that and then double it.

It’s supposed to “fuck” with your reward and risk processing circuitry - in particular to make them actually work for people where they naturally don’t work.