I’ve been told that I might be autism-spectrum by non-experts, but the counselors I’ve talked to suggest I have attention-deficit disorder. I got 20 on the test.
Psychiatric diagnoses are the map, not the territory. Many have overlapping symptoms, likely because the mechanisms are not all that well-understood.
I would not go so far as to say that the statement “$person has ADHD” is semantically null, but it conveys far less useful information than “$person is likely to benefit from Ritalin”.
Addendum: My instincts point towards rule consequentialism—as a finite limited-information machine, optimizing my adaptations seems to me like generally a good way to win the better outcomes.
Same here. I’ve been diagnosed (by multiple therapists/neuropsychologists/etc.) with ADD, while on multiple occasions, non-experts have thought I had (or might have had) Asperger’s syndrome. Meanwhile, a few people with AS said that I seem fairly neurotypical to them. And I’ve been evaluated for it but not diagnosed. So I’m probably somewhere on the border (if there is a border).
I agree with Will Newsome on the significant deviation of LW/SIAI aspie-types from the “one/a few obsessive interests” criterion. Until I was 13 or so, I did have a fairly single-minded focus on computers (programming and such), but my range of interests exploded around that time. And thanks to my ADD, I don’t tend to stay interested in any one thing long enough to get much done on anything...
I’ve been told that I might be autism-spectrum by non-experts, but the counselors I’ve talked to suggest I have attention-deficit disorder. I got 20 on the test.
Psychiatric diagnoses are the map, not the territory. Many have overlapping symptoms, likely because the mechanisms are not all that well-understood. I would not go so far as to say that the statement “$person has ADHD” is semantically null, but it conveys far less useful information than “$person is likely to benefit from Ritalin”.
Addendum: My instincts point towards rule consequentialism—as a finite limited-information machine, optimizing my adaptations seems to me like generally a good way to win the better outcomes.
Same here. I’ve been diagnosed (by multiple therapists/neuropsychologists/etc.) with ADD, while on multiple occasions, non-experts have thought I had (or might have had) Asperger’s syndrome. Meanwhile, a few people with AS said that I seem fairly neurotypical to them. And I’ve been evaluated for it but not diagnosed. So I’m probably somewhere on the border (if there is a border).
I agree with Will Newsome on the significant deviation of LW/SIAI aspie-types from the “one/a few obsessive interests” criterion. Until I was 13 or so, I did have a fairly single-minded focus on computers (programming and such), but my range of interests exploded around that time. And thanks to my ADD, I don’t tend to stay interested in any one thing long enough to get much done on anything...