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Thanks for taking the time to math that out :) I have seen a few psychiatrists in the past 5 years and unfortunately medication wasn't an option. I do think I'm performing better with age however!

What are the prerequisites math domains someone should be proficient in if they were interested in making this career? I'm a long way off currently (just started learning calculus) and some kind of reference point would be very helpful! Congratulations by the way.

You've skipped over nicotine. While I've never smoked and could not recommend it (for many reasons) I do use nicotine patches for increased focus and productivity. Nicotine carries a lot of negative associations because of their link to cigarettes but a lot of the dangers of cigarette smoking are actually related to things other than the nicotine itself. The chemicals in a cigarette are quite toxic and cigarette smoke is harmful to the lungs. The fact that cigarettes co-administer MAOI's and have a powerful behavioural trigger that reinforces addiction makes me consider nicotine patches to probably have a low potential for addiction. On the stimulant angle, I also prefer the extended release stimulants, a slower release profile is much less spiky, and lends itself to a smoother experience, less tolerance and less anxiety.

As a West Australian I think that there are certain expenses you're overlooking. You'd need access to a car, there are no buses or trains to many of the towns (sometimes the larger mining companies do organise buses or chartered flights). Internet will be slow painfully slow and prohibitively expensive, where $200 worth of hardware and $40 a month (on a one year plan) gets you a whopping 1GB of quota. Food is very expensive, alcohol even more so if you're into that sort of thing. Living in the outback can be very unpleasant depending on where you go.

My roommate is an electrician and has done plenty of fly in fly out work, while the money is (often not always) good, he can't handle more than 6 months at a time since there is often not much to do in small towns.

LotteryWest runs the West Australian lottery and the fraction they donate to charity is enourmous, so that's a generalisation that does not necessarily hold true everywhere.

I did see it, I would have linked it in the opening sentence but I couldn't seem to make it happen with the tags.

And I also suspect that it may apply to subgroups of people with Attention Deficit Disorder

It seems the case, the study that comes to mind is Executive Function Impairments in High IQ Adults With ADHD by Brown, Reichel & Quinlan. People with ADHD were much more likely to have Working Memory Index and Processing Speed Index (WMI & PSI) scores two standard deviations below their Verbal Comprehension Index or Perceptual Organisational Index (VCI & POI). As a side note, VCI is considered the best indicator of premorbid IQ.

I've actually been meaning to ask this for a while, can you (assuming this study is accurate) use Bayes theorem to argue that where VCI/POI>WMI/PSI is two standard deviations out, ADHD is a possibility worth considering? (and the numerical value of that possibility if I'm being ambitious?)

DOI: 10.1177/1087054708326113 for those interested.

Nice find. Some people claim that it is impossible to know the mind of god, but people clearly have ideas about what it should look like, otherwise how would they recognise it? I always imagine what would happen if "god" did exist and actually came down to Earth to introduce itself. Would the organised religions accept him? What if it started contradicting their scripture and undermining their power?

That's true, statistical significance isn't the most sophisticated statistic. My rule of thumb is looking at the p and d values.

That critique doesn't really work for t-tests though does it? Sure, as n increases so does your chance that the finding is statistically significant, but it also reduces the chance of the data being a fluke. If you flip a fair coin a million times holding a banana in your left hand and it comes up heads 55% of the time... there's some explaining to do. Even if the explanation is that it wasn't a fair coin.

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