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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?

#641

Post by JackMorgan »

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #538
lumost wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

The results seem pretty clear that CBT can be quite effective in helping with ADHD.

Unlike insulin, which cannot be produced with any sort of therapy, it does seem that ADHD can be significantly improved.

I'm sorry though that the facts seem to bother you so much.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22480189/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28413900/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32036811/

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

#642

Post by anon84873628 »

vl wrote: post #154
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…

Have you tried Adderall? It gives extreme competitive edge. Just to get legal and easy access to performance-enhancing drugs in elite educational (aka competitive) setting it makes sense to get "disability". And given how loosely these conditions are defined, it's not even cheating in the true sense of the word.

My third time sharing this link in this post because it's just so relevant. A Slate Star Codex classic:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-mo...

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

#643

Post by vl »

Aurornis wrote: post #579
skeeter2020 wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steriods will give you a massive physical advantage too. If you're not doing something with a governing body and get them prescribed you're golden.

This is actually another growing problem: TRT clinics will prescribe testosterone to virtually anyone who requests it. Among new TRT patients, a large number of them didn't even have bloodwork drawn before receiving their first prescription. Many of the TRT clinics also hide the fact that going on TRT results in testicular atrophy and lifelong dependence. The forums and Reddits are full of people who decided that inj…

TRT is one of those things which requires precise and active management. But it also increases quality of life and well-being so much for 45yo and beyond that it’s insane not to use it. (And same thing with HRT for women).

Your choice is to die chronically ill, weak and depressed for decades, or feeling great and enjoying your later years.

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

#644

Post by bawolff »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #628
kenjackson wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But where is that level of speed distinction important? I just don't know anywhere where being 10% faster translates into much actual real value. If you can write a function in five minutes and it takes this other person 5.5 minutes -- do you really view that as the key difference in ability? Even in time constrained situations, compute/processing speed is almost never the issue.

I mean.. if you can finish a task for a client in a day, and someone else needs two days, isn't that a huge difference? Or to turn it around, if someone does 10%, 20%, 50% more in the same time period, isn't that significant? I mean.. we are comparing students abilities here, and doing stuff fast is one of those abilities. Even potato peelers in a restaurant are valued more if they're faster, why not programmers too?…

I don't think test speed is correlated with that.

Like anything i had to do in a test when i was taking my CS degree is maybe 5% if not less of the portion of my real job tasks. Even if i was triple as fast at taking those tests, i think that would be a neglibile increase in on the job speed.

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

#645

Post by vl »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #519
vl wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried Adderall? It gives extreme competitive edge. Just to get legal and easy access to performance-enhancing drugs in elite educational (aka competitive) setting it makes sense to get "disability". And given how loosely these conditions are defined, it's not even cheating in the true sense of the word.

Steriods will give you a massive physical advantage too. If you're not doing something with a governing body and get them prescribed you're golden.

If you have enough your own testosterone then doing TRT is more harm than good. But once you get older and don’t anymore - TRT is golden.

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

#646

Post by quantified »

baumy wrote: post #240
thewebguyd wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are also cultures that aren't very diverse that are pretty high-trust: Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Japan, even China. Which goes to say, diversity likely has very little to do with whether a society is low-trust or high-trust. It's more about politics and policy.

This doesn't seem like a conclusion that's supported by the available evidence. We have examples of homogeneous cultures that are high trust, and ones that are low trust. We have examples of diverse cultures that are low trust, but none that I'm aware of that maintain high trust over time. The best fitting hypothesis would be that homogeneity is necessary but not in itself sufficient for a high trust culture to be bu…

Diversity is relative. The difference between Irish and English ancestry created low trust in the mid-1800s USA but is fairly irrelevant today. Trust grew over time.

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

#647

Post by Aloisius »

adolph wrote: post #603
Aurornis wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a different statistic. Not all students who report having a disability on a survey will be registered with their school's disability office.

Fair enough. I formerly went through large schools' reported numbers, which isn't the most straightforward thing to find. UT Austin has 4,299 registered Spring of 2025, which is 12.9% of a 55k student population. Ohio has 5,724 of a total of 66,901, so 8%. FSU is ~5,000 of ~55,000: 10%. These are all much higher than the article's claim but definitely lower than the NCES survey. https://disability.utexas.edu/statisti…

This cites an NCES study which doesn't appears to be locked down to approved researchers, but it provides a national number:

> In 2019-20, 8% of students registered as having a disability with their institution. This rate was 10% at non-profit institutions, 7% at for-profit institutions, and 7% of students at public institutions.

https://pnpi.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/StudentswithDisa...

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

#648

Post by astrange »

doctorwho42 wrote: post #621
psunavy03 wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of like having any kind of strong interest in any kind of niche topic apparently now magically teleports you onto the autism spectrum. No, that's not how that works . . .

Don't forget being observant of things that many people in our distracted (attention economy) society tend to miss/ignore. I had a friend's wife gas-light him into thinking he is on the spectrum and that many of his friends from college are as well... A well established and respected engineering school in the US. I'm not saying there aren't people there who would most likely fall onto it, but being detail oriented or…

If his friends are engineers that's, uh, believable. It depends on the kind of engineer of course, but they are certainly like that. The question is if they're high-functioning or not.

I always think of the SMBC "old physicist" comic: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21

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

#649

Post by jaredklewis »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #619
jaredklewis wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say it is infeasible for standardized tests, but why? Is it that much harder to give 50 students and extra hour than to give 5 students an extra hour? Or just design the tests so that there is ample time to complete them without extra time. But putting aside standardized tests, in the context of this discussion about Stanford, I think these accommodations are being used for ordinary tests given for classes, so St…

But how do you differentiate students who are able to finish the test (correctly) in an hour from those needing 2 hours for the same task? In real life, you're rarely given unlimited time for your tasks, and workers who can do more in less time are considered better than the ones who always need deadine extensions, so why not grade that too?

I'm fine if a teacher or organization decides that thinking speed is an important criteria to evaluate, in which case I think the same time limits should apply to everyone.

I'm also fine if a teacher or organization decides they just want to evaluate competency at the underlying material, in which case I think a very generous time limit should be given. Here the time limit is not meant to constrain the test taker, but is just an logistical artifact that eventually teachers and students need to go home. The test should be designed so that any competent taker can complete well in advance of the time limit.

I only object to conditionally caring about the thinking speed of students.

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

#650

Post by jbullock35 »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #614
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.…

I can not think of a single test I have ever taken where I could be limited by handwriting speed. Most of the time on tests is spent thinking, not writing.

When I was a student in the United States in the 1990s, I took many tests in which handwriting speed limited me. It was purely a physical problem. When I was permitted to type, there was no issue. To be clear, I'm speaking of tests in the humanities and social sciences, for which students must write short essays.

Later, when I was a professor in the United States, I saw some of my students grappling with the same problem.

I don't think that my students and I are extraordinary. Other people were, and are, limited by slow handwriting when they are required to handwrite their exams. You could try to identify these people and give them extra time. But the better move would be to stop requiring students to handwrite essays under a time constraint.

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