I'm not so sure the knowledge acquisition is slower. I'm actually starting to believe it's faster. What my other ADHD friend and I notice is the threshold for thinking you get it is lower. I'm not sure I'll ever fully understand any single thing but I do have a lot of peers which will say yes far earlier and it leads to a lot of confusing experiences.
A common experience we have is that we'll be trying to figure something out then go talk to a larger group or find someone who should understand the thing (e.g. highly relevant publications) and then either "huh, I never thought about that" or they try to answer a different question (I understand they are trying to be helpful but I'd rather "I don't know". It's academia, the whole point is we don't know lol).
Though in other things I fully agree. I'm always slower in "speed to first result" but often that's because I'll write code from scratch, make sure I really understand, and make sure its flexible because I know I'm going to be hacking on it a lot. Others are often forking repos doing a lot of gluing and all that. (When I do that I feel very lost and like I understand nothing). But my experiments end up being more complete and I'm able to answer more questions where someone else would say that's too much work.
I think academia needs both types of people btw. I'm not trying to say I'm better it's just different. There's different advantages. My issue is that the system strongly optimizes for one and not the other. I think the biggest flaw in academia is thinking we know what's a successful line of research and what isn't (along with what's novel, especially post hoc lol). All the evidence seems against this and the high frequency of dark horses suggests it'd be idiotic to rely on predictions to be highly accurate.
I too think knowledge acquisition is faster - much faster - but that's only when I can actually get myself to sit down and focus. Depending on some magic combination of my mood, feeling of purpose, and phases of the moon, I can blow through a thick spec book in one long session and remember both tons of little trivia and grok the principles behind the design, all in one pass - or, I'll get sleepy after the third sentence, take an involuntary nap halfway through the first page, and overall maybe read a dozen pages before giving up, and not remembering much of if later.
I had this experience several times at work - I had to deal with some obscure legacy tech (think industrial protocols from the 90s), I enthusiastically figured I can learn this quickly, sat down to reference material, and... my eyes stopped being able to process text. And yet, over the following weeks or months, I'd have moments trying to work with that old thing, where I'd suddenly find a rabbit hole I had to chase, and through that chase I'd get rapidly up to speed with the spec that was impossible to even look at earlier.
Long term, this added to a much deeper understanding than people around me had, for fraction of the effort - so this was a win. Unfortunately, this also isn't compatible with how everyone works, as I can't plan or give other people promises or estimates around this. "I'll get there when I get there" doesn't fly in the modern workplace.
Like a few other related aspects of ADHD, it really is a superpower - just very hard to activate, and trying to activate it on demand actually makes it impossible.
What makes me sad though is that it seems this is not how it used to be. In fact from what I can tell it was more common in high innovation labs to select these types of people and kinda let them loose. The job wasn't so much to tell them what to work on so much as make sure there aren't things blocking them and to make sure they don't get stuck in the rabbit holes. Of course it was never all sunshine and roses, but it did seem that the environments were a lot more flexible. Even several recent Veritasium videos have talked about people who just essentially didn't do their actual job for like a year, "slacking off", and how this gave them the opportunities to explore certain ideas.
I really think we have to admit how many dark horses there are when it comes to innovation. If we don't provide space for them, then we slow progress down. If we don't create an environment, then it slows. Do we really want to go back to the time where most science was performed by the wealthy? Because only they were the ones who had the luxury of being able to explore?
I often think back to Asimov's "Profession"[0]. I can't help but think this in part was a critique on academia and the relationship to this issue.
A common experience we have is that we'll be trying to figure something out then go talk to a larger group or find someone who should understand the thing (e.g. highly relevant publications) and then either "huh, I never thought about that" or they try to answer a different question (I understand they are trying to be helpful but I'd rather "I don't know". It's academia, the whole point is we don't know lol).
Though in other things I fully agree. I'm always slower in "speed to first result" but often that's because I'll write code from scratch, make sure I really understand, and make sure its flexible because I know I'm going to be hacking on it a lot. Others are often forking repos doing a lot of gluing and all that. (When I do that I feel very lost and like I understand nothing). But my experiments end up being more complete and I'm able to answer more questions where someone else would say that's too much work.
I think academia needs both types of people btw. I'm not trying to say I'm better it's just different. There's different advantages. My issue is that the system strongly optimizes for one and not the other. I think the biggest flaw in academia is thinking we know what's a successful line of research and what isn't (along with what's novel, especially post hoc lol). All the evidence seems against this and the high frequency of dark horses suggests it'd be idiotic to rely on predictions to be highly accurate.