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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?

#281

> the current language of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) allows students to get expansive accommodations with little more than a doctor's note. Isn't that... good? What else would be expected if you have a disability, and need accomodations?

The problem is that it is also applied to disabilities that are not objectively measurable and therefor extremely prone to abuse.

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

#282

It's like when all the prisoners in Orange is the new Black start to claim they are Jewish in order to get the nicer Kosher meals from the cafeteria.

Lol! I did that (sometimes) when I was in hospital in the UK. If you requested a halal meal they sourced it from a takeaway down the street, which was excellent, and a wonderful break from the usual dismal fare. I wasn't a dick about it, and would ask the meal order folks if it was OK to request one that day; sometimes they said 'yes', and sometimes not (based on what, I don't know), but they knew what was up, and didn't mind doing favors for those of us who'd been in a while. I'm still ridiculously grateful. The NHS (back then, a quarter century ago, now) was amazing.

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

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of minor fraud is completely normalized within middle and upper classes. It's half the way many kids end up at these schools in the first place, thinking of the "pay-to-play" scandal at USC a while back.

So it’s funny, I grew up upper middle class with an extremely severe morality taught to me re: this kind of thing — integrity, etc. My entire adult life has been a lesson in how that’s a maladaptive trait in America in 2025.

That has been one of the underpinning lessons of Trump's America to me. That playing by the rules and doing the right thing just makes me a sucker. Once a critical mass of people start to feel that way (if they don't already) it'll have a devastating effect on society.

(when I say "Trump's America" I don't directly mean Trump himself, though he's certainly a prominent example of it. It feels like it's everywhere. One of the first times I really noticed it was the Netflix show "Inventing Anna". A dramatization of the real life story of a scammer, Anna Sorokin. Netflix paid her $320,000 for her story. She led a life of crime and successfully profited from it. Now she's been on Dancing with the Stars, essentially she's been allowed to become the celebrity she pretended to be.)

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

#285
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't everyone get extra time?

That's a much bigger meta question, like what's even the point of putting timing constraints on any test? Logistically, my kid has to go a testing center at the school during his free period and/or lunch periods for his extra time. I can imagine that if everyone got extra time, it would be a logistical nightmare. But I think the reality is that our educational system had just decided that faster is better and that sp…

> But I think the reality is that our educational system had just decided that faster is better and that speed is a legitimate way to grade and rank students. Which is stupid.

That's not stupid. Speed does in fact matter in the real world. To illustrate the point, let's consider an extreme example: what if it took me an entire year to do something that someone else could do in an hour? My results would be so slow that nobody would tolerate me as an employee or partner. On the other extreme, if someone takes 1h1s instead of 1h it's not really a big deal.

I don't think it's unreasonable to draw a line somewhere and say "if you can't do it this fast, you haven't learned the material adequately". The tricky thing is where to draw that line, not whether such a line is ok at all.

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

#286

That doesn't seem outrageously high for a high cap school? 15-20% of the world is estimated to have a disability. So Stanford population is high, but approximately double the average of a random global population sample. Now, think about the selection pressures Stanford applies. Stanford selects students who are fighting for top academic honors. Those students are dealing with brutal competition, and likely see their…

> 15-20% of the world is estimated to have a disability.

Not a chance in hell.

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

#287

American society is at the point where if you don't play these sort of games/tricks, you'll get out-competed by those who do. Bleak.

I've made it a principle to live my life according to certain ideals - one of which is not to play these games/tricks.

I'm doing better than fine.

Have others who cheated done better than me? Sure - some have. Why should I care? I'm a high income earner and I don't need an even wealthier life.

I am not at all an outlier. If you're amongst a crowd that won't value you for not cheating, it's on you to change the crowd you hang out with.

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

#289
post #73
post #58

I think there's a non-malicious explanation for a percentage of this. As I grew up in the 80s, there were two kinds of gifted kids in school: The kind that would ace everything anyway, and the kind that, for a variety of reasons, lacked the regulation abilities to manage the school setting well, with the slow classes and such. A lot of very smart people just failed academically, because the system didn't work for the…

> The percentages of workers that are neurodivergent is much higher than usual Is it much though? 38%? I haven't seen one in 15 years across 5+ different companies. > there's a big cadre or neurodivergent people that are just in the line where they are very productive workers anyway Alternatively, it just became popular to label others or oneself that way. And tech elites have nothing better to do in free time. Also…

> Also DEI benefits!

Ah, you accidentally showed your hand there. DEI does not provide benefits; it seeks to prevent continued, assumedly unfair, selection processes. Whether or not that is appropriate, or if the system was unfair, is arguable; fictitious "benefits" are not.

No one gets a DEI check from the government. But since you don't even see that others around you have disabilities, we can't really expect you to know much more than Fox tells you.

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

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The word "cheating" is loaded with a lot of values and judgement that I think makes it inappropriate to use the way you did. There's a point where it's not immoral to leverage systems available to you to land yourself in a better situation. Avoiding increasingly-overcrowded housing situations is I think one of them. If Stanford's standards for these housing waivers are sufficiently broad that 38% of their students qu…

This attitude was one of the things that collapsed the former Eastern Bloc. "He who does not steal is stealing from his own family."

Stealing from work was so normalized in the former USSR that it wasn't even considered stealing, just "carrying out". Jobs in meatpacking facilities were highly desired because even though nominal wages were low, workers could make so much more by selling on the black market. The entire system was rotten from top to bottom.
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