Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

reason.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

561–570 of 1001 posts

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

#561

Post by qazxcvbnmlp »

barchar wrote: post #294
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…

I don't see how you spending time in ways that work well with your challenges is different from your job providing accomodations, except that if your employer is willing to work with you then you don't have to randomly roll the dice until you come up with an employer where things happen to work in whatever way you wanted. It's not like one of the accomodations on the table is "not doing your job"

The difference is how you relate to the job providing accommodations. If you know certain employers are more willing and able to provide accommodations then you can consciously weigh that piece of information when considering a job/career field.

By consciously accepting who you are and how you work with the world, it lets you navigate better in it. For some people that is just feeling it out and ending up in a career that fits them. For some people, it might be getting a diagnosis. The end result might be the same.

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

#562

Post by margalabargala »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #200
margalabargala wrote: post #103

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…

If you lie (or exaggerate) about a disability and claim a benefit, you could be denying somebody with more serious disabilities getting the help they need.

I agree. That's not what's happening here.

My understanding is that the requirement for the benefit being discussed here is "has had a diagnosis of ADHD, anxiety, etc".

The problem lies in the combination of overdiagnosis and lax Stanford disability requirements. The teenagers honestly mentioning they have an ADHD diagnosis to get the benefit are not the problem, they are a symptom.

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

#563

Post by DaSHacka »

IAmBroom wrote: post #289
lostmsu wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

> DEI does not provide benefits; it seeks to prevent continued, assumedly unfair, selection processes.

So it is not a benefit to be hired for a role over your peers because you satisfy an ethnic requirement needed for an arbitrary quota? I dont know about you, I'd sure love to have that on my side.

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

#564

Post by mapontosevenths »

AlexandrB wrote: post #535
powerclue wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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?

Of course it's terrible for the genuinley disabled. That said, I would rather accidently assist an able person than accidently fail to provide the required accommodations for a genuinely disabled person. The default should be acceptance.

Those who abuse these systems should be given an all expense paid trip to the surface of the sun. Ripping off the disabled is about as low as a person can get, and that is what they are doing.

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

#565

Post by p-e-w »

esascammer wrote: post #556
shetaye wrote: post #81

Regarding Stanford specifically, I did not see the number broken down by academic or residential disability (in the underlying Atlantic article). This is relevant, because > Some students get approved for housing accommodations, including single rooms and emotional-support animals. buries the lede, at least for Stanford. It is incredibly commonplace for students to "get an OAE" (Office of Accessible Education) exclus…

It is beyond frustrating that people - in general - abuse accommodations for those with legitimate disabilities in order to bring their pets into places they don’t belong.

This is 100% the fault of a society that has continuously pushed to expand the meaning of “disability” (and many other words) until it no longer resembles anything that a reasonable person would associate with the term, while aggressively silencing anyone who dared to speak out against that concept creep.

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

#566

Post by brailsafe »

swatcoder wrote: post #117
hibikir wrote: 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…

> people that are just in the line where they are very productive workers anyway Of course, that applies to everybody who achieves a stable career at all. Exceedingly few people (if anyone) are competent and capable at everything, even when you're just talking about basic skills that are handy for common, everyday work. Your doctor may be a incorrigibly terrible driver, your bus driver may pass out at the sight of bl…

> Of course, that applies to everybody who achieves a stable career at all.

This stuck out to me, because even in tech, especially after being diagnosed with ADHD (out of desperately failing to adapt, despite technically being reasonably competent) my career and statistically that of many others is normally anything but stable. An overwhelming percentage of jobs and disciplines do not have any real affordances for just a little variation from the norm, and people broadly still do not believe the condition presents anything but hilarious superficial differences, but that otherwise if the person shares one skill with other employees they should be capable of being an arbitrary cog like any other.

"Other people are capable of showing up on time, why can't you!?"

"Well, I have ADHD, I have to take medication to regulate my dopamine levels and struggle with time blindless, it's a real problem that I wish I didn't have, but I do my best given regularly switching contexts and priorities"

"Ya, great, that's cute but show up on time, are we on the same page?"

"No, but I'll say yes because you can't understand, I have no choice, and I'll continue doing what I'm doing until you fire me for not meeting your expectations, even if they have nothing to do with the skill I do actually have and gravitate towards, and would like to continue applying in service of company growth or whatever"

"Great, then we're on the same page, and I'll just start checking in on you more frequently because clearly you're retarded, thanks"

----

The only people who do realistically get accomodations are either in super niche fields, are absolutely exceptional in their niche field, or are just on their own or in industries that require none of the normal things associated with their discipline.

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

#567

Post by neltnerb »

jbullock35 wrote: post #534
AlexandrB wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 perf…

It is an interesting point about handwriting as distinct from reading or writing alone. I appreciate it, thank you.

I would not concede that speed is not as important as doing it correctly in the context of evaluating learning. There are homework, projects, and papers where there is a lot of time available to probe whether they can think it through and do it correctly with no time limit. It's ideal if everyone can finish an exam, but there needs to be some kind of pressure for people to learn to quickly identify a kind of problem, identify the correct solution approach, and actually carry out the solution.

But they shouldn't be getting penalized for not doing a page of handwritten linear algebra correctly, I totally agree that you need to make sure you're testing what you think you're testing.

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

#568

Post by Aurornis »

mikkupikku wrote: post #404
notrealyme123 wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow that's interesting! Could you share your sources?

Source for amphetamines being a performance enhancing drug? Try some lol. Really, they're habit forming and destructive so don't take them, but the reason they're so popular is they really do kick you up.

> Try some lol.

Trying amphetamines classically gives short-term euphoria and confidence boost.

There have been a few studies on this. If you give college students amphetamines they will report performing dramatically better, but their actual performance is maybe slightly improved at best and some measures are worsened: https://www.mdpi.com/2226-4787/6/3/58

The notable thing is that they all report doing much better despite the actual results not matching their self-assessment.

So don't "try some" and then think you're going to be speeding around like a superhuman for the rest of your life if you get a prescription.

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

#569

Post by brrwind »

reducesuffering wrote: post #205
brrwind wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in giving an immediate diagnosis of anything I don't think this is a complete picture? Sure, they have to provide a diagnosis in order to bill insurance, but that can be something like F43.2/adjustment disorder, which is not a clinical diagnosis of depression or anxiety. Your comment makes it sound the typical experience is that you can just waltz into a talk therapist's office and be handed a slip of paper that sa…

One one hand you say sure, they have to provide a diagnosis like an adjustment disorder, and on the other you say walking into a therapist's office and getting that is like a rare pill-mill? Is your only distinction that depression would be harder to obtain? This article is talking about any sort of mental health "disability", and the way the mental health system financials work is that it's no wonder we have so many…

> Is your only distinction that depression would be harder to obtain?

Yes. You seem to be taking chagrin with the fact that therapists have to attach a diagnosis code in order to bill insurance, and then conflating that with inflated diagnoses of mental disorders that qualify as disabilities.

My issue with your comment is that I think you're taking a systemic issue (which I acknowledge, btw) and framing it as therapists' misconduct. If your claim that therapists are categorically diagnosing anyone who shows up for the purposes of billing were true, we'd expect to see very high diagnosis rates specifically among therapists who rely heavily on insurance, relative to those who are mostly private-pay. I don't have that data, but I'd be surprised if the difference were as extreme as your framing implies.

What did change in a clear, documented way was the DSM-5 criteria in 2013, which lowered thresholds for several conditions and broadened who qualifies for a diagnosis. That is diagnostic classification problem, not a "therapists are gaming the system for billing" problem.

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

#570

Post by ThrowMeAway1618 »

teknopaul wrote: post #184
MangoToupe wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think there's a non-malicious explanation for a percentage of this. What on earth is a "malicious" explanation of this?

I don't understand how yous can be ignorant of this. In the USofA you get advertised at continuously by drug companies. Do you really think they spend that money advertising, and that you can then not buy the products?!? Sure, you need a corrupt doctor. But the amount of advertising tells you exactly the amount of corrupt doctors that can act as drug dealers for you. If someone is advertising something at you, it's b…

>If someone is advertising something at you, it's because you can get it and you are potential market.

>Not rocket science.

Yep. I see adverts for Psoriasis and so, of course, I developed Psoriasis although I never had it before I saw the adverts. I see adverts for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) and, of course, then developed it because I am a "potential market."

Even better, I see adverts for tampons, sanitary pads and "feminine' deodorants. As such, I underwent gender reassignment surgery so I could then purchase said products because I'm a "potential market."

Yes, the above is satirical. And no, I don't purchase products because " they spend that money advertising"

If I show you an advert for brassieres, are you then forced to purchase them because of all the money spent on such adverts? Are you even slightly tempted to do so?

If I show you an advert for literal snake oil as a cure-all, are you then powerless to stop yourself from purchasing it?

I hate to break it to you, but we Americans aren't slaves to, or required to spend money based on, consumer advertising.

Heck, I don't drink Coca-Cola or Budweiser. If what you say were true, I'd literally be drowning in that garbage.

Please take your ridiculous stereotypes elsewhere.

Edit: Fixed typos.

Post reply on HN