Readit Newsangadh commented on Aldous Huxley predicts Adderall and champions alternative therapies angadh.com/inkhaven-7... · Posted by u/surprisetalk
This article (and the title alone) is harmful. Adderall is not about increasing mental efficiency.
What Adderall is about is:
- helping with executive dysfunction for people who suffer from it.
- allowing people with ADHD like me to function. To do the things that everyone else does, things that we want to do and need to do, but can't do because of the way our brains are wired.
- increasing the lifespan of ADHD people who don't get help. Women with ADHD die about 9 years younger than those without ADHD [1].
- making our lives less painful, since every small task incurs pain, resulting in 3x depression rates [2] and alarmingly high suicidal ideation rates (50% of ADHD adults [3]).
Please, please, educate yourself about ADHD and medication for it before writing something like this title.
No, Aldous Huxley didn't. "predict" Adderall.
To understand more, I've put together a resource which, I hope, will be easy enough to digest. Here's my experience of getting prescribed Adderall for my ADHD:
https://romankogan.net/adhd/#Medication
If I have attention deficit and I could write it, I hope you (and the author of the text we're discussing) could spare some attention to it before talking about Adderall, amphetamines, and other stimulants prescribed for ADHD.
Thank you in advance.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/01/23/nx...
[2] https://add.org/adhd-and-depression/
[3] https://crownviewpsych.com/blog/adhd-increased-risk-suicide-...
The author of this piece—which I am—is reporting on Huxley’s MIT talk. He predicted a drug that improves mental efficiency/focus. And the talk discusses alternative non-pharmacological approaches.
You are welcome to either actually read my piece or, better, listen to his talk. There is no judgment against the substance but a call for additional approaches to enhance a person.
angadh commented on Claude finds contradictions in my thinking angadh.com/contradictions... · Posted by u/speckx
The article you link is a very specific type of failure that apparently did not happen in this instance, where Claude was able to access the author's writing. And the author apparently found the insights useful, though the lack of analysis from the author on that value makes this article basically meaningless for an outsider.
I am apparently a different type of person than the author because my obsidian vaults look nothing like theirs, but I can't imagine asking an LLM for a meta-analysis of my writing. The whole point of organizing it with Obsidian is that I do that analysis myself - it is part and parcel of the organization itself.
Appreciate the thought—my comments in Claude's analysis are now added on the margins.
The exercise is not meant to do much else but spot patters in my thinking that I can reflect on. Nothing particularly novel here from Claude but it is helpful, for me, to get external feedback.
angadh commented on Claude finds contradictions in my thinking angadh.com/contradictions... · Posted by u/speckx
I scrolled to the bottom looking for the part where the author says which of these contradictions are meaningful to them, and didn't find anything. If any of the LLM output is meaningful here's, the author is going to have to tell me.
I was skimming so maybe I missed it. But if this is just raw LLM output, I don't see the value.
This post is updated now to have these reflections on the margin notes. No need to scroll down. I was not done with this post when whoever found it here linked to it.
angadh commented on Claude finds contradictions in my thinking angadh.com/contradictions... · Posted by u/speckx
Maybe it would be better to prompt topic-by-topic. I think as it stands Claude is essentially hitting you with the Barnum effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect (I think a lot of laypeople use LLMs as a modern replacement for tarot or astrology.)
Thanks also for the link—didn’t know about the Barnum effect!
angadh commented on Claude finds contradictions in my thinking angadh.com/contradictions... · Posted by u/speckx
Maybe it would be better to prompt topic-by-topic. I think as it stands Claude is essentially hitting you with the Barnum effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect (I think a lot of laypeople use LLMs as a modern replacement for tarot or astrology.)
Usually that’s what I typically do in talking with Claude but my first vault is so haphazard at this point that it’s a bit of a lost cause.
This prompt to find contradictions was merely to see where the contradicting notes are, as a little toy experiment.
I still have to annotate this post as it allows me to see what I do and don’t agree with Claude on.
However, this half-baked “AI slop” post is making me reflect on my style of working with my site; it usually gets little traffic so I put whatever I want on there but clearly someone has it in their feed and posted one of the less interesting posts here IMHO.
I can only presume, based on timing of the talk being 1960, that his thoughts here link to mescaline and the practical utopia he talks of in Island, whose inhabitants make use of a local psychedelic. So whatever he must have said here had more to do with his later perspectives than his feelings around the island.