Attention Dialed Into a Higher Dimension

[ADDled]

Well, there is a difference between belief and fact. If religion or spirituality help than use them. I do, the spirituality part, anyways. The difference between the religion and spirituality, I think? Religion is for people that don’t want to go to hell, spirituality is for those that have gone through it.

I just get concerned when beliefs are passed off as facts. The sad thing is that there are “spiritual predators” that take advantage of vulnerable people. Suggest, not preach.

Do I believe that ADD is an evolutionary thing so that nature ensures the development human race? Yes. Do I believe that some people can be “gifted” for some unknowable reason? Sure. Because if nature leaves everything to the “neuro-norms” (neurologically normal – a phrase I heard someone with Asperger’s Syndrome describing other people – but I think it describes non ADDer’s accurately) I think we’re doomed to pretty boring, drab, mediocre existence with no excitement. And maybe no future.

Sometimes in my deepest despair when people do not understand what I go through everyday, I tell myself that ADDers will make the world a better place. We’ll leave it better than we found it. Would the BP oil spill in the Gulf Coast happened if an ADDer were in charge? I’d like to think not; we would have figured this kind of thing will happen and been more proactive in finding solutions for problems that will/can occur.

Foresight: a wonderful thing. It’s no wonder that when limited to linear thinking or are only viewing the world from a spreadsheet that things go badly wrong. It’s just a matter of time.

I hope this helps and good luck

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[Saffron]

@ADDled, I hear you.

Personally, I get concerned when I see more and more examples of people believing everything they read (see Stella’s remarks: “I also read that…” and “I just pass on what I read.”) while schools still fail to teach even the very basics on cognitive biases and logical fallacies.

People seem to have a growing resistance to complex reasoning. And they have a growing hostility to science. I recently read that what most irritates scientists is the way fluff-believers continually say “Science doesn’t have all the answers.”

Funny, because science is the one area where answers are *never* taken to be static or written in stone. Rather, they are continually reexamined from every angle. Every claim based on science must be backed up by controlled research, be logically sound AND be continually subject to replication or refutation and then to update. Researchers must publish their studies, and they must subject them to peer-review. They must openly declare all financial/competing interests.

Even when a claim by a pharmaceutical firm is distorted or fails to report all of the information, the distortion is eventually outed by this self-correcting system. (I work in medical publishing, and am constantly seeing studies published that correct or update pharmaceutic studies. We published one of the first studies that found statins can cause muscle atrophy, for example.)

None of the above checks and balances is true for claims made by Big Placebo or by writers of fluffy woo. They get to say anything they want, while taking hypocritical potshots at career scientists who have come by their learning through years of education. Frankly, this annoys me to no end.

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[ADDled]

Last week’s Globe and Mail’s Focus and Books section contained an article on “Critical Thinking” by John Allemang. In a new book by philosopher Martha Nussbaum, she is “raising the alarm against higher education’s growing obsession with knowledge that you can take to the bank”. In a nutshell, Nussbaum concern is that the humanities in university are facing tough times against the “culture of market-driven schooling”.

Increasingly, governments are funding more technical and scientific endeavours and that schools are now challenged with supplying talent for these areas. However, schools, being profit driven, are directing most of the resources to the scientific, engineering and technical areas. And you guessed it, no one is going to universities for liberal arts degrees anymore. It’s just not a lucrative field to be in these days.

As a result, our ability to argue using intellectual strength is greatly reduced. We now live in a society where conformity and obedience is greatly rewarded and that alternative thought or points of view is oppressively discouraged. Everything is an 8-second sound bit from some authority who may or may not have an agenda. What’s behind the curtain?

Sometimes, I will challenge people when they say “I heard …” or “They say….”

I never had the opportunity to go to university (because of ADD, undiagnosed, at that time) so I certainly would have loved to have to chance to learn critical thinking in an academic situation. What I have learned about critical thinking, logic and reasoning is what I have picked up “on the street”. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance being a start. I guess in this case hyper-focusing is a good thing.

Closer to home, I work for a very larger engineering corporation and their lack of understanding of how the world really works is apparent. Every decision, in every aspect, of their corporate culture is about maximum efficiency at minimum cost (engineering logic). The fact that some the people who work for them have different values, opinions or beliefs than theirs never occurs to them. Or, that human behaviour is unpredictable. Definitely a humanities deficiency disorder at play here.

I’m not slamming engineers, we need them. Our world is better for them.

Hope this helps and good luck

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[Anonymous]

Some people have ADD or ADHD, I’m not disputing that the chemicals in their brains and the way they work might need some help. There are alternatives to drugs. A truth’s initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed. It wasn’t the world being round that agitated people, but that the world wasn’t flat. When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic. – Dresden James Contempt, prior to complete investigation, enslaves men to ignorance. – Dr. John Whitman

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[Anonymous]

*face/palm* I give up. There just isn’t any convincing this one.

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[Anonymous]

You’ll notice I almost totally resisted this thread, Jaybird. That’s because there’s no arguing with a true believer. You could have an argument with your shoes and get the same sense of frustration if you wanted to, but again, there would be no point.

Stuff like this is not worth the oxygen of your attention.

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[Saffron]

Hey there, Stella. How’s that reading going? Here’s some material to help you argue convincingly for your point of view while more successfully refuting others. Look forward to hearing back from you after you’ve given these a look. The examples in these lists are actually pretty fun to peruse:

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/The_Fine_Art_of_Baloney_Detection

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Logical_fallacy

OR: http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.html

Enjoy.

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[Patte Rosebank]

@walt, that reminds me of a line from the classic Nichols & May “Telephone” sketch, in which a man tries vainly to convince several operators that he just lost his last dime, while trying to make a payphone call. Despite the man’s overwhelming evidence that the phone ate his dime, the first operator insists that it didn’t, and delivers the classic line: “Bell Telephone cannot argue with a closed mind.”

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[veronica]

insert popcorn eating smiley HERE! hahahaha

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[Ivriniel]

Evolution. I do not think it means what you think it means.

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[Ivriniel]

” It wasn’t the world being round that agitated people, but that the world wasn’t flat. “

For the record, the idea that people thought the Earth was flat is bunk.

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[Anonymous]

Saffron, I <3 U.

You’re awesome.

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[Saffron]

I heart you too, Nimthiriel!

Cheers

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[Anonymous]

Personally, I was raised by a woman who was into new age stuff, and can relate. The problem with this post is it wasn’t a question, or a suggestion, or a discussion- it was presented as a one sided lecture. It’s a big deal to say to someone, “You know- you don’t really have (insert psychiatric disorder here) it’s all about this here thing-ma-jiggy!”

“A truth’s initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed.”

Do you feel this explanation is “the truth” about ADD? Do you see anything in this statement here that might be seen as arrogant or off putting to the people you are speaking to? That is how I interpreted it.

The thing is, whatever you want to call or explain ADD- it doesn’t really matter to me. What matters is if you have it, how it effects your life, and how effective approaches are in dealing with those challenges. Pegging it on colors isn’t going to make my challenges go away. People can have their theories, but it doesn’t make my life easier to live. I mean- I’m still going to pile up dishes, have issues with social interactions…just to name a couple of things.

Is this approach really about helping people?

Maybe this is something that works for you. I can dig that. I can’t dig someone trying to convert me on something as big as this though.

It’s like trying to convince a catholic to become an atheist- or vice versa even. You have to understand and value where other people are, otherwise it can be offensive.

I can relate to having found something helpful and meaningful in my life, and wanting to show the world “the answer”. But, pushing things on people doesn’t work. I personally find doing so to be disrespectful.

Kapeash? Do we grok?

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[Anonymous]

“It’s like trying to convince a catholic to become an atheist- or vice versa even. You have to understand and value where other people are, otherwise it can be offensive.”

Not quite…. While there are plenty of “militant” atheists who are irrational and stupid, for most of us the reason for atheism is an evidence-based approach (see Saffron’s post on the scientific method), where religion isn’t.

If a Catholic is open to evidence and understands the scientific method and is honest about applying it to the world they see around them, they change. It happened to my fiancé :-p He was raised to be a Catholic, but was also raised to think critically. Ultimately, he gave up Catholicism because he realised that he could not base everything else he accepted about the universe on empirical evidence, yet hold this one thing as an exception. It’s why I, raised without religion but sent to a religious school, was unable to convert – to accept a deity would have required me to reject all my intellectual principles for just this one case.

Sorry, I rambled. But in this place, I’m sure that’s not entirely unexpected :-p

Back to my point: In every religion vs science case, the simple fact is that it is actually one of empirical, repeatable and refutable evidence vs. anecdotal evidence. One has lead to all the technology and understanding we have today, the other can lead to the placebo of crystal healing.

And to address the earlier comment that “Science doesn’t have all the answers”:

It doesn’t have all the answers YET – our understanding of the world is constantly growing. And it actually *has* answers and explanations, unlike most superstitions. Think back to the days when epilepsy was thought to be demonic possession (a superstitious belief) – science showed it to be otherwise. If not for scientific enquiry, we’d still be drilling holes in people’s heads and performing exorcisms, rather than treating them with medications that actually work (and it matters not whether scientific enquiry is performed by atheists or people who are religious; it is the method that is important, not who uses it).

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