[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41432477]

Now you’re making me curious why people with ADHD (me included) tend to have a weird tendency for writing longer run-on sentences with commas, that on top of that use more parenthesis than average. Often nesting them, even. Because according to research our working memory is a little lower on average than neurotypicals, which seems to contradict this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41432848

Perhaps the text itself is functioning as working memory.

Both ADHD people and neurotypicals have deeply structured thoughts. “Serializing” those thoughts without planning ahead leads to the “stream of consciousness” writing style, which includes things like run-on sentences and deeply nested parentheses. This style is considered poor form, because it is hard to follow. To serialize and communicate thoughts in a way that avoids this style, it is necessary to plan ahead and rely on working memory to hold several sub-goals simultaneously, instead of simply scanning back through the text to see which parentheses have not been closed yet.

It could also be simply that ADHD people have “branchier” thoughts, hopping around a constellation of related concepts that they feel compelled to communicate despite being tangential to the main point; parentheses are the main lexical construct used to convey such asides.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41433367

It’s not just “branchier” thought that make it hard to communicate, it’s graphier thoughts, when you mean (it’s important) to communicate that it’s not just a tree, but that connections may also go both ways, and sometimes they even have cycles. That to see the full picture in more nuance you’ve got to consider those feedback loops, and that they don’t necessarily have precedence one over the other but that they must be all taken account simultaneously.

When you explain it serially you are forced to choose a spanning tree, and people usually stop listening when the spanning tree has touched all the relevant concepts, then they persuade themselves they got the full picture but miss some connections, that make the problem more complex and nuanced.

When graphs have more than one loop, loopy belief propagation doesn’t work anymore and you need an another algorithm to update your belief without introducing bias.