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Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?

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Re: Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?

#531

Post by qazxcvbnmlp »

hamdingers wrote: post #402
qazxcvbnmlp wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well put. > A lot of modern, aspiring-middle-class and online culture Theres also a pernicious way of identifying with the struggle. Instead of I have trouble focusing in certain situations, so maybe I should find ways to spend my time (careers, hobbies) that work well with that. We instead go to 'I have ADHD' and my 'job' should make special accommodations for me. Regardless of whether a job should or should not mak…

> maybe I should find ways to spend my time (careers, hobbies) that work well with that You're really close to getting it. Students in school do not have this flexibility . They are required to be there, an 8th grader has no control and little influence over how their time is spent, or whether their tasks are a good match for their abilities. So the only option in school is accommodation. There are some who continue…

This is an important distinction. Indeed, many behaviors (ie attachment issues) that are maladaptive for an adult can be adaptive to a child and it is important to not change those without taking into account the environment a child is in.

An 8th grader may not have control over how their time is spent, but an attuned response from the people around them will help the child adapt.

A child experiencing: 'everyone around me can take this test, but i cannot, I must be dumb'

vs

A child experiencing: 'everyone around me can take this test, but i cannot, I must be dumb' and a caring figure in their life explaining to them 'you show traits of ADHD, this commonly makes it harder for you to focus on things like a math test. it really hurts when you fail the test and you wanted to get an A. Why don't you try again at the same problem at home, I believe in you. And maybe I will talk to your teacher about some extra time for the next test. We can't always get this, and even if you don't pass the test it's ok.'

Re: Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?

#532

Post by ux266478 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #398
ux266478 wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll disagree with that on a few points. Britain was inarguably the most diverse, with almost no attempt at creating cultural homogenity (and it really wasn't that great for anyone not Scottish or English.) Rome attempted it to some degree, with attempts to have a unified culture largely decreasing as time went on, being replaced with a Christian identity. China is extremely complicated in this matter and goes to ext…

> You also ignore the flagrant existence of powers that were not diverse. The Phoenicians interacted with a lot of cultures and influenced them very deeply, but Canaanite society was highly insular. Viet Nam was a powerful society that expanded continually, but it engaged in aggressive replacement colonialism of peoples it conquered These societies hit scaling limits precisely because they failed to diversify. > Dive…

> These societies hit scaling limits precisely because they failed to diversify.

Neither of them hit 'scaling limits'. The Phoenicians made a strategic mistake at the outset of the Punic wars, and Viet Nam took the Mekong delta just 150 years ago, almost entirely wiping out the Khmer Krom. Shortly afterwards, international politics had changed so much that aggressive territorial expansion stopped being profitable.

> One can deprioritize the points of difference

Which is assimilation. Think about what deprioritization actually entails. Prioritization of language for example. Deprioritization means that you cannot have a person who speaks Sicilian fluently, and English at an A2 level. As a natural consequence, Sicilian as a language dies in that family after 3-4 generations have passed as a natural effect of no longer being the higher priority language. This happens across all cultural axes. Speaking as someone whose descended almost entirely from early Syrian immigrants to America. Deprioritizing identity means giving up that identity to every degree that matters.

> Romans Italians and later provincials into their citizenry.

Roman power was established at a time when their diversity meant gangpressing non-Latins into conscription and not giving them citizenry afterwards. While they eventually began extending citizenry to conquered people, and later even equated Romanness with citizenry, much of their diverse populations like the Germanics, the Celts, the Levantines, the Maghrebis, never cared about Rome or Romanness. The Germanics even destroyed Rome, and none of the rest cared when it all went up in flames. It was just an annoying exploiter, one in a long line of many. I think the scaling limit point is interesting because Rome explicitly did hit a scaling limit at the peak of their diversity and shortly afterwards collapsed into hell on earth. Cherry on top of Anatolians and Germanics running away with their identity because it had become completely meaningless.

Re: Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?

#533

Post by TeMPOraL »

mmmlinux wrote: post #483
Phithagoras wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a high stakes, challenging environment, every human weakness possible becomes a huge, career impeding liability. Very few people are truly all-around talented. If you are a Stanford level scientist, it doesn't take a lot of anxiety to make it difficult to compete with other Stanford level scientists who don't have any anxiety. Without accommodations, you could still be a very successful scientist after going to a…

Water before toothpaste = adhd now?

Isn't this how you're supposed to be doing it anyway?

Re: Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?

#534

Post by jbullock35 »

AlexandrB wrote: post #509
jbullock35 wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In general, being good at academics require you to think carefully not quickly. Yes, but to go even further: timed tests often test, in part, your ability to handwrite quickly rather than slowly. There is great variation in handwriting speed — I saw it as a student and as a professor — and in classrooms, we should no more be testing students for handwriting speed than we should be testing them on athletic ability.…

This is true about other things like reading speed as well. It still doesn't mean that time limits are useless. These are skills you can develop up to a reasonable level through practice if they're lacking, not something fixed like height. And if it takes you 12 hours to get through a 2 hour test because of these factors it's a sign that you're not going to be a very effective employee/researcher. Being able to read/…

> Being able to read/write with some haste is not unrelated to job/academic performance.

Yes, I agree. But my point is about handwriting, rather than writing in general. Handwriting speed is something that we are effectively testing with many in-class exams. And handwriting speed - unlike reading or writing speed - is indeed unrelated to job performance. It is also unrelated to any reasonable measure of academic performance.

Re: Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?

#535

Post by AlexandrB »

powerclue wrote: post #222
mapontosevenths wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because they really are both very smart and disabled at the same time. I agree with almost everything you say here. However, I wanted to point out that you make the same mistake the articles author does. "Disabled" and "Diagnosed" are not actually the same thing, even though we do describe ADHD and the like as "learning disabilities." Being diagnosed with a learning disability or other type of neuro-divergency does…

The article is pretty clearly someone trying to drag disability on to the stage of the culture war because it's another group that's easy to other, imo.

Do you think the disabled are being helped by letting bad actors trying to get a leg up over their peers abuse accommodations meant for them?

On pretty much every "culture war" issue the "left" fails to adequately grapple with bad actors and those that abuse empathetic policies to harm others or unfairly advance themselves. Long term this will be to the great detriment of marginalized groups because societal support for these accommodations will erode. It's really frustrating to watch.

Edit: If you want a recent example of this coming full circle, take a look at service animals. Sometime around 2021-2023 there was a wave of people claiming their pets as "service animals" or "emotional support animals" and bringing them everywhere in public. At first this was tolerated or even welcomed by businesses but increasingly animals are being banned from these spaces because of badly behaved pets. Those with genuine need for a service animal are caught in the crossfire.

Re: Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?

#536

Post by shadowgovt »

acedTrex wrote: post #451
shadowgovt wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the fundamental issue isn't the apples; it's the barrel. If everything is a competition, then of course people will leverage personal advantage for personal gain. But why is everything a competition?

> But why is everything a competition? For all of human existence there has been competition for limited resources. Until all resource scarcity is eliminated competition will remain in the natural world.

That's one theory.

Counter theory: for all of human existence people have shared resources and traded among each other. Yes, for truly scarce resources trade breaks down.

So is "good housing" a scarce resource on Stanford's campus? Or is their default resource allocation schema too anti-human so it's turning something that should be a simple trade and negotiation problem into a knife-fight?

Re: Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?

#537

Post by jph00 »

beambot wrote: post #157
jph00 wrote: post #147

Amongst groups for extremely gifted kids I’ve seen, well over half are neurodivergent. It’s a well understood issue in gifted kids psychology. When these kids are accommodated appropriately they ace their classes, and when not, they fail out entirely, even at the most basic levels of education. So the statistics mentioned in the article are not necessarily inconsistent with what we’d expect, since Stanford is a highl…

Just curious: If non-neurodivergent children are given the same accomodations (which are?) do they significantly outperform their peers too? For example: it's well known that 1-on-1 instruction time correlates to better academic outcomes. (I'm not an educator; I have no idea.)

I don't know about Stanford, but in earlier schooling accomodations can include things like being allowed to sit on a bouncy chair, or use a fidget toy, or type instead of hand-write (physical asynchronous development is a common issue), or wear headphones, or take more frequent breaks.

I do think that more flexibility in educational environments might be good for most people, yes.

Re: Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?

#538

Post by MagicMoonlight »

lumost wrote: post #394
ultrarunner wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Adderall and other amphetamines only have problems with long term usage. My research was done a long time ago. I understood Ritalin to have mild neurotoxic effects, but Adderall et al to be essentially harmless. Do you have a source for the benefits giving way to problems long-term? Regardless, your overall point is interesting. Presumably, these drugs are (ridiculously tightly) controlled to prevent society-wide h…

I went to university at a time that Adderall was commonplace, and am now old enough to see how it turned out for the individuals. At college, it was common for students to illicitly purchase Adderall to use as a stimulate to cram for a test/paper etc. It was likewise common for students to abuse these drugs by taking pills at a faster than prescribed pace to work for 48 hours straight amongst other habits. In the wor…

Lmao, imagine saying this kind of slop to someone with diabetes.

“Cognitive behavioral therapy matches insulin after 5 years”

(because they die - so they’re no longer counted)

Re: Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?

#539

Post by munchbunny »

jaredklewis wrote: post #395
Aurornis wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original article which is linked in this post goes into much better detail: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/01/elite-universit... Schools and universities have made accommodations a priority for decades. It started with good intentions, but parents and students alike have noticed that it's both a) easy to qualify for a disability and b) provides significant academic advantages if you do. Another big acc…

Can someone explain to me why the accommodations make sense in the first place? Like what's the point of having the test be time constrained? If there is no point, then just let everyone have more time. If there is a point to having the test be time constrained, then aren't we just holding one group to a lower standard than another group? Why is that good? Same question about lectures. Is there a reason everyone can'…

Some fairly simple examples where accommodations make the test more fair:

* You have a disability that hinders your ability to type on a keyboard, so you need extra time to type the essay based exam through vocal transcription.

* You broke your dominant hand (accidents happen) so even though you know all of the material, you just can't write fast enough within normal "reasonable" time limits.

* You are blind, you need some way to be able to read the questions in the test. People who can see normally shouldn't need those accommodations.

I don't think those are cases where you are lowering the bar. Not by more than you are allowing the test taker a fairer chance, anyway.

The problem is when you get into the gray area where it's not clear than an accommodation should be given.

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