Live data from Hacker News

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

reason.com

811–820 of 1001 posts

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

#811
post #674

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…

> This used to be a thing with medical marijuana as well (maybe still is?).

Yup. A few years ago in California, go to a weed store in Napa. "Oh, you need a medical card" "Oh, sorry". I get handed a business card, no worries, just call this doctor here, it'll be $x (can't remember) and you can get a medical card and just come back in. I had my medical card within 5 minutes on the phone on the sidewalk outside the store.

Was having stress related ED issues a fews ago. Hit up Hims, fill out the questionnaire. Physician reviews it in our online chat. "If these are your answers, I would not be able to prescribe for you. If your answer to Q3 was x, Q5 was Y, then I would. Would you like to review your answers before re-submitting?"

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

#812

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is it really gaming to get a doctors note to say a pet cat will make you happier?

My stepdaughter just started college. She told the tale of a boy and a girl who tried to claim that a cat was an ESA or service animal for both of them. The one cat. For both people. Just so happened that they were a couple in high school, and this was their effort to game the system to get assigned to a dorm together (the university generally wouldn't allow a co-ed dorm assignment like that, and had rules about relationship "overnights" in the dorm.

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

#813
post #394

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…

> Cognitive Behavioral Therapy matches prescription drugs at treating ADHD after 5 years.

Apropos of anything else, 5 years of weekly CBT to get to the same result is a _lot_. 260 hours of therapy that, on my current health insurance would cost nearly $12,000 in copays. And during that 5 years you're still dealing with your ADHD to some heavy extent.

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

#814

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I nearly failed high school and I flunked or dropped out of college four times. I just absolutely cannot work within the framework of modern schooling. I say this as humbly as possible, but still I'm one of the best engineers I know and working on some pretty advanced stuff. And yes, I'm rather autistic. The way my brain works is just fundamentally incompatible with school. Starting from fundamentals and building up…

I say this as humbly as possible, but still I'm one of the best engineers I know and working on some pretty advanced stuff. And yes, I'm rather autistic. lol...there is nothing humble about this statement. >50% of people think they're above average.

I have a friend like this he is absolutely the smartest I know, maybe not the most effective. My point is that most people have drawbacks. I much rather work with an autistic myself you learn to handle the quirks.

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

#815
I was just researching exceptional people with trisomy 21 and was pleasantly surprised by this article. I think Stanford, Harvard, and other elite institutions with these rates of disabled students must accept all ranges of students with disabilities including those with Down syndrome. I was especially inspired by people like Pablo Pineda who articulated how it's society that keeps them from succeeding and I agree. There's no reason for these universities to only accept the type of disabilities that wealthy students can rig the system for.

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

#816
post #734

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think about this quite a lot. I’ve come to the conclusion that in the past acting with integrity was rewarded and lacking integrity was punished. In 2025 it seems integrity is meaningless, “winning” is all that matters. Particularly, you are not punished for acting without integrity but definitely “punished” for having it.

Are you under the illusion that greed and selfishness is a vice unique to the 21st century? You would think someone with an internet connection would know better. Humanity has always been this way. In most contexts where the concept "integrity" is evoked it carries with it at the very least a tacit acknowledgement of the strong temptation to do otherwise, that is part of the reason it is recognized as a virtue. I rea…

Has the cultural attitude towards shame perhaps shifted?

There was a gilded age in the early 20th century and we appear to have entered another gilded age - do you think something structural or cultural has changed? I have a hard time a president like Trump getting elected in past elections - certainly he models himself after Nixon and even Nixon was a very very different kind of president both in temperament but also being less about self aggrandizement.

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

#817

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how my parents taught. Design questions to make the students apply their knowledge rather than regurgitate it. Forget a fact it's being applied to, look it up. Don't understand the concepts, you're stuck. Know the material, piece of cake. One time I was in my father's classroom because he was showing a film he wanted me to see. There was a quiz afterwards, he knew it wouldn't be alien to me and had me try it.…

One physics exam question I remember was derive Maxwell's Equations from the starting point of presuming the existence of magnetic monopoles. This sounds like an intractable problem, but it turned out that if you really understood how they were derived, all you had to do was switch out the charge monopoles with the magnetic monopoles, and it was a piece of cake. A similar exam problem in AMA95 was to derive the hyper…

I do think that's one of the reasons it's easier to do in physics. You're taught to see math as a language and therefore need to interpret it. With that in mind who cares if you memorize formulas and can churn out some algorithmic computation. You'll memorize formulas "accidentally" as you use them frequently. But if you don't know how to interpret the math you're completely fucked and frankly probably won't do well as a physicist. Much of the job is translating back and forth.

I actually loved my classical mechanics class. The professor was really good and in the homeworks he'd come up with creative problems. The hardest part was always starting. Once you could get the right setup then you could churn away like any other (maybe needing to know a few tricks here and there).

Coming over to CS I was a bit surprised how test based things were. I'm still surprised how everyone thinks you can test your program to prove its correctness. Or that people gravely misinterpret the previous sentence as "don't write tests" rather than "tests only say so much"

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

#818
post #702
post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The issue of course is "medical science" has continually lowered what is normal. Men 50 years ago had significantly higher testosterone than today. The blood work normal CI reflects this decrease. In reality, any man lower than 600 should probably be supplementing TRT. However, you're not likely to get it prescribed before you are below 300, and even then, it'll be just enough to get you back over the curve. There's…

> median total testosterone for the cohort born after 2000 is 391 ng/dL.

Really interesting. I wonder what is age range. This is beyond low. At this level you naturally feel tired all the time.

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

#819
Performing well academically is not at all mutually exclusive with ADHD or Autism. In fact, it is possible for those to manifest in ways that benefit academic performance. It also isn't really surprising that students in a highly competitive environment would suffer from anxiety and depression.

I suspect that many of these people would be able to make it through college with good grades regardless of accomodations, but at the cost of reduced emotional and mental health.

And there are also probably others who legitimately have ADHD or Autism, but don't really need any special accommodation to do well academically.

Post reply on HN