Comment by dns_snek

3 months ago

That was a treat to explore. All of those are based on self-assessment surveys or toy problems. The UK report reads:

> On average, users reported time savings of 56 minutes per working day [...] It is also possible that survey respondents overestimated time saved due to optimism bias.

Yet in conclusion, this self-reported figure is stated as an independently observed fact. When people without ADHD take stimulants they also self-report increased productivity, higher accuracy, and faster task completion but all objective measurements are negatively affected.

The OECD paper supports their programming-related findings with the following gems:

- A study that measures productivity by the time needed to implement a "hello world" of HTTP servers [27]

- A study that measures productivity by the number of lines of code produced [28]

- A study co-authored by Microsoft that measures productivity of Microsoft employees using Microsoft Copilot by the number of pull requests they create. Then the code is reviewed by their Microsoft coworkers and the quality of those PRs is judged by the acceptance rate of those PRs. Unbelievably, the code quality doesn't only remain the same, it goes up! [30]

- An inspirational pro-AI paper co-authored by GitHub and Microsoft that's "shining a light on the importance of AI" aimed at "managers and policy-makers". [31]

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dns_snek

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TeMPOraL  3 months ago

> Yet in conclusion, this self-reported figure is stated as an independently observed fact. When people without ADHD take stimulants they also self-report increased productivity, higher accuracy, and faster task completion but all objective measurements are negatively affected.

Interesting analogy, because all those studies with objective measurements are defied by US students year by year, come finals seasons.

  • dns_snek  3 months ago

    Yeah, they take them because they get high. Believing in things that are unsupported by empirical evidence is in the domain of religion, not science.

    • TeMPOraL  3 months ago

      You can't really get high much on prescription-level dosages - that quickly gets tricky logistically and prohibitively expensive. People who look for highs go to the street for a reason.

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