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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?

#681

Post by antisthenes »

Aurornis wrote: post #558
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…

> Being diagnosed doesn't immediately mean you should be accommodated. This is the loophole. Universities aren't the ones diagnosing, they're the ones accommodating. The current meta-game is for parents and students to share notes about which doctors will diagnose easily. Between word of mouth and searches on Reddit, it's not that hard to find doctors in any metro area who will provide diagnoses and accommodation req…

Wow.

Great to know we're basically raising an entire generation without any integrity.

Can't wait to be in a nursing home where all the staff are trying to meta-game for lowest amount of responsibility rather than caring for the elderly.

And believe me, I'm the last person to disparage the truly disabled or those down on their luck. But 38% in a developed country is just straight up insane. Not to mention that if you have a "disability" that is treatable with medication, should you still be accommodated?

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

#682

Post by Teever »

WalterBright wrote: post #660
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean... usually those tests check the correctness of answers too, so you're comparing students under the same circumstances, evaluating how much (writing, calculations.... whatever) they're able to do, correctly of course, within an alotted time period. If someone can correctly solve 17 math problems in that time and someone else can do 21, the second one is "better" than the first, since they're both faster and th…

If I'm paying a professional by the hour, yes, it matters if he can do it in one hour rather than two. I once hired a civil engineer to do a job for me, and he started billing me for time spent learning how to do it. I refused to pay him. (There was nothing unusual about the job, it was a simple repair task.)

That's a tricky one that I find myself pondering a lot as a contractor.

I've ultimately decided that if it's something I'm required to learn for this specific task then I'm billing for the time spent doing that. But if it's something that I figure I should know as a person being hired to do a task in this particular domain then I won't bill for it.

To me it's the difference between hiring a mechanic to 'rebuild an engine' and 'rebuild a rare X764-DB-23 model of an exotic engine.'

It's reasonable to expect a mechanic to know how to rebuild an engine but it isn't necessarily reasonable to expect a mechanic to know how to rebuild that particular engine and therefore it's reasonable for that mechanic to charge you for their time spent learning the nuances and details of that particular engine by reading the manual, watching youtube tear down videos, or searching /r/mechanic/ on Reddit for commentary about that specific video.

It's important to strike a balance between these kinds of things as a contractor. You don't want to undervalue your time and you don't want to charge unreasonable rates.

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

#683

Post by alexashka »

drivebyhooting wrote: post #300
BeetleB wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you have children? I do. I still subscribe to your ideals or at least mostly follow them. But for lack of playing such games, I saw my children’s opportunities slip away.

Opportunities to be among the insufferable nepo baby cohort?

The most revealing example of this was when I found out how many of UK's 'elite' school children were molested, grew up and proceeded to do everything they can to make sure their children attend these very same 'elite' schools.

Western culture is beyond repair.

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

#684

Post by MangoToupe »

MangoToupe wrote: post #112
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…

> I haven't seen one in 15 years across 5+ different companies. I'm guessing you are blind, yea? Otherwise how could you otherwise justify such a statement?

> Alternatively, it just became popular to label others or oneself that way. And tech elites have nothing better to do in free time. Also DEI benefits! Who else would be allowed a medical break due to a burnout and stress?

The person is clearly retarded themselves. Let's not judge too harshly

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

#685

Post by shadowgovt »

A lot of commenters have focused on the ADHD, but the 38% number is from anxiety, depression, and ADHD.

... and this generation of students has every reason to be anxious and depressed. I'm surprised the number isn't over 50%. They're watching the white-collar jobs (the kind of jobs that justify a Stanford degree price-tag) get hammered by AI with no plan to back-stop the unemployment resulting than the same answers from the past (i.e. mutterings of "bootstraps" and "saving" and "stop eating avocado toast"), they're watching fascism creep over the nations of the world again, they're watching the annual thermometer rise, the weather get worse, and the world pass tipping-point numbers that our best models suggest will lead to incredibly sweeping climate changes... And they're watching the current leadership of the planet do not enough to address any of this.

I have a teenage niece that is 100% convinced she'll never own a home. I don't have anything concrete to tell her to convince her otherwise.

So yeah... Maybe those double-digit percentage numbers are pretty justified by all of this.

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

#686

Post by aynyc »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #633
aynyc wrote: post #78

I don't know about Stanford students' actual disability, so I can't say much to that. I went to shitty high school and decent middle school in relatively poor middle class neighborhood. Now, I live in a wealthy school district. The way parents in the two different neighborhood treat "learning disability" is mind blowing. In my current school district, IEP (Individual Education Program) is assigned to students that ne…

> Please note that, this doesn't take away resource for regular kids, in fact, classrooms with IEP student get more teachers so everyone in that class benefits. There is a limited amount of money in the school system. When resources are assigned to one place they are taken away from somewhere else. The kids in the class without IEP students are getting boned by this policy.

That’s just a callous myth.

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

#687

Post by OhioMan2943 »

OGEnthusiast wrote: post #25

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 was happy enough getting into the second best uni in my country on my own merit- I know that I could have gotten into the best if I talked about family members and pets passing and personal challenges like all my friends but that doesn't benefit anyone.

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

#688

Post by godelski »

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.

I remember a Linear II test where we had to do Gram-Schmidt on a few large matrices and the prof was a stickler for showing steps. I'm not sure if writing was the limiting factor but it was definitely a major factor. Quantum mechanics is also one of those where there can be a lot of intermediate steps if you don't have things like group theory under your belt (and you usually don't if you're in Griffiths).

I think I'd be careful about generalizing your experience, nor mine. If my time in academia has taught me anything is that there is pretty high variance. Not just between schools, but even in a single department. I'm sure everyone that's gone to uni at one point made a decision between "hard professor that I'll learn a lot from but get a bad grade" vs "easier professor which I'll get a good grade." The unicorn where you get both is just more rare. Let's be honest, most people will choose the latter, since the reality is that your grade probably matters more than the actual knowledge. IMO this is a failure of the system. Clear example of Goodhart's Law. But I also don't have a solution to present as measuring knowledge is simply just a difficult task. I'm sure you've all met people who are very smart and didn't do well in school as well as the inverse. The metric used to be "good enough" for "most people" but things have gotten so competitive that optimizing the metric is all that people can see.

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

#689

Post by gverrilla »

dctoedt wrote: post #679
gverrilla wrote: post #676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are praising billionaires while complaining about people gaming the system? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It wasn't praise — just an observation about how grades and class standing aren't always a good predictor of success. (I never met Joe Jamail, but by reputation there was a lot about him that I didn't especially admire.)

The problem is your identifying success with becoming a billionaire. To me, in the contrary, it's the telltale of a profoundly broken society.

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

#690

Post by Spooky23 »

koolba wrote: post #674
Aurornis wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Being diagnosed doesn't immediately mean you should be accommodated. This is the loophole. Universities aren't the ones diagnosing, they're the ones accommodating. The current meta-game is for parents and students to share notes about which doctors will diagnose easily. Between word of mouth and searches on Reddit, it's not that hard to find doctors in any metro area who will provide diagnoses and accommodation req…

> There are now also online telehealth services that don't hide the fact that this is one of their services. You pay their (cash only, please) fee and they'll make sure you get your letter. The same thing is happening with "emotional support animal" letters. This used to be a thing with medical marijuana as well (maybe still is?). The answer is for schools to grab their share of this money by selling each of these ac…

Or just operate so that everyone gets the academic benefits.

My roommate in the 90s was ahead of the curve, he memorized the Cosmo quiz “do you have ADD” went to the student center, got a script that he sold or snorted, and got to take his test in a comfortable room at a time scheduled centrally.

Just randomize assignments to rooms all over campus.

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