Are there useful similaries between high time-preference and Attention Deficit Disorder?

Taking ADD as high interest-preference, by analogy of time-preference, as the ratio of the present values given to immediate interest (or interestingness, to differentiate it from the economic term, and not to suggest that I have more of a ready definition for this term) vice future interest:

A person of high interest-preference may in class focus on immediately-interesting doodling, whereas a person of low interest-preference may figure on going to Disney World on the income she'll have with the skill she's acquiring in this same class. Which example immediately suggests that the major function of a school is to create an artificially low interest-preference among its students, by force if necessary (a legitimate use: the property owner ejects a distracting element). Similarly a person of low time-preference will make an investment a high-time-preference person would not; and a government may create artificially high time-preference by taxing saving. As societal trends in time-preference influence interest rates, so also may societal trends in interest-preference influence the length and complexity of books and other media.

As people of variable time-preference come together in lending, so may people of variable interest-preference come together in -- what? One example might be that of one student doing the homework of another. The student buying the labor has demonstrated high interest-preference by preferring immediate drunkenness over use of the skills the homework aims to train; the student selling the labor has contrawise demonstrated low interest-preference.

As a firm led by a CEO of lower time-preference may out-compete a firm led by a CEO of higher time-preference, so may people of differing interest-preference may compete -- when?

As people must have time-preference, so may it be said that people must have interest-preference: a person of zero interest-preference would spend a lifetime of drudgery (to what end?) without any anticipated enjoyment. A person of infinite interest-preference would never suffer schooling that was not more intrinsically interesting than any immediate alternative.

... Having said all this, I think I may have just replaced 'time' with 'interest', and 'subjective value' with 'subjective interestingness'. In this case, ADD seems to equate to high time-preference in the case of the single good of leisure.

Well, I don't believe in ADD to begin with. See the Thomas Szasz On Psychiatry thread. But if you mean to imply that ADD is simply laziness or a lack of enthusiasm and interest, I might agree.

The idea of zero TP came to mind when I was playing the expansion to NWN 2 recently. In the Hag coven you run into this Archlich and his undead 'companions' - he basically states he has the rest of eternity to wait in line to see the Hags. Needless to say, things didn't go too well for our zero TP friend.

I've been playing NWN2 as well lately. I haven't played the expansion that much yet, but I did make it past the hag coven.

ADD, ADHD, and OCD patients have low dopamine levels which correlate to goal-oriented tasks. They tend to be workaholics and work repetitively. [1] They have less any creativity and analogical thinking capabilities, as lack of dopamine correspondes to decreased positive priming, increased negative priming and latent inhibition. They have concrete, non-ambiguous, linear, and convergent thinking skills. [2] [3] Their decisions are based on their perceptions. Studies suggests that lack of analogical reasoning is the effect of a steep hierarchy neural networks.

Cannabis users have higher analogical thinking and creativity levels, because dopamine causes low latent inhibition and flat hierarchy activation of neurons.

My conclusion is that ADD have neither low or high time preference. IMO, ADD patients can have very low time preference. It is just a different paradigm of cognition.

Here are the symptoms of ADD vs. Schizophrenia:

Schizophrenia	ADD
Creativity	Narrow
Psychosis	OCD
Aha!	Workaholic
Intuition	Logic
Abstract	Concrete
Analogical	Concrete
Holistic	Linear
Dopamine	Deficiency
Associationism/Positive priming	Latent inhibition/negative priming
Wide and Flat tree representation	Steep tree
Sleep	Awake
Divergent	Convergent
Gestalt	Segmentational
Ambiguous	Non-ambiguous
Stochastic	Exact
Relax	Stress
Intrasensory	Extrasensory
Distributed?	Discrete?
Induction	Deduction
Diverse recall	Conditioned/instinct recall
Context independent	Context dependent
Relaxed constrants	Constrained
Creative association	Learned associationism