> They said that 38% of successful students are unlikely to be disabled.
Which is an unreasonable claim.
I have a disability that impairs many aspects of my life. I was still capable of getting through college and am successful in my career. Having a disability does not mean you can't do academics.
What does that have to do with the claim? It is very unlikely that 38% of Stanford students are actually disabled, and your success has nothing whatsoever to do with that.
Have you gotten one of these notes yourself? It's not trivial. It's a huge pain in the ass, and everyone along the path is saying, "I don't believe you".
I have, and my experience does not match yours. It was extremely trivial and was little more than (1) booking a psych appointment, (2) filling out an intake ADHD questionnaire at home (which can easily be filled out to give whatever diagnosis you'd desire), (3) meeting the psych & getting a formal diagnosis, and (4) picking up my Rx from the pharmacy.
This is not what they're describing. Have you ever gone through the process of receiving an accommodation at a university? It is significantly more challenging than just having a diagnosis. They will look for every single possible excuse to refuse you access. They will require you to repeatedly book new doctor's appointments to get extremely specific wording for any accommodation you may need. Your doctor will have to fill out multiple forms for the university. Then, for each class, you will have to meet with every professor you have to request your accommodations. Many of these professors will try to talk you out of using them, or find ways to get around them.
Dx out here required all those steps plus attestations from family and teachers, historical accounts, written narratives, a check in with the GP, bloodwork and blood pressure, and ongoing follow ups at least quarterly.
Plus all that happens before you get an accommodation, which is a wholly separate process.
The "left handedness" graph change that occurred once we stopped punishing people for being left handed. Same sort of thing here. We'll stabilize once we get good at diagnosing it and stop stigmatizing it. We're in a period where the graph is changing, and that change is disruptive, but it'll level out.
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.
This is the common gag reflex, but multiple things can be true at the same time; there can be a greater need for support of disabled persons AND a shocking abuse of the systems by priviledged students. Ditto for the need to support women & minorities at the same time as white males are doing poorly and need help.
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 for these accommodations will erode. It's really frustrating to watch.
Edit: If you want a recent example of this coming full circle, take a look at service animals. Sometime around 2021-2023 there was a wave of people claiming their pets as "service animals" or "emotional support animals" and bringing them everywhere in public. At first this was tolerated or even welcomed by businesses but increasingly animals are being banned from these spaces because of badly behaved pets. Those with genuine need for a service animal are caught in the crossfire.
> 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.
> Long term this will be to the great detriment of marginalized groups because societal support for these accommodations will erode. It's really frustrating to watch.
Where I'm from there are hardly any accommodations offered for those who are marginalized yet they're stigmatized for using the little help that there is. Also it's usually a loud minority that's against it, as I haven't seen any majority form to abolish it via voting.
Aside from that those who are tasked with executing these policies broadly agree that going after every bad actor is not worth the false positive rate.
I know a couple who became parents young and are now going through college as a family. When they applied for scholarships in their respective universities, one institution accepted immediately, the other is still dragging out the process because for some insane reason there's both an upper and lower income limit for those who apply.
Someone somewhere figured this would somehow deter bad actors so now those who genuinely need help need to jump through additional hoops.
> Sometime around 2021-2023 there was a wave of people claiming their pets as "service animals" or "emotional support animals" and bringing them everywhere in public.
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 future as hanging on their ability to secure one of a small number of slots in the school. Anxiety would be genuinely higher in the student body than, say, students at a mid rate state school.
Stanford wants students with strong test scores, especially those who are strongly capable in mathematics. High spatial awareness, cognitive integration, and working memory can be positive traits in some autistic people and some find strong success in standardized environments and in mathematics.
We're also improving diagnostic tools for autism and ADHD, and recognizing that the tools we used missed a lot of cases in young women, because they present differently than for young men.
Imagine a house party where the guests are selected at random from MIT or Stanford, then imagine you selected guests at random from, say, all Americans. Are you telling me you'd be surprised if the MIT and Stanford crowd had a noticeably different population demographic than the overall American population?
8.3% of Americans 18-34yo have a disability according to the Census department.
Stanford's rate is 4.3x higher than that.
Add in that half of all students who claim a disability have no record of a diagnosis or disability classification prior to beginning college, all the reports of rampant cheating in school, the Varsity Blues college-admissions scandal where some parents helped their kid fake disabilities to get ahead, and even people here who seem to think it's ok to defraud the system to get ahead?
I think perhaps elite schools need a better way to gauge an applicant's ethics to deny them entry since the last thing the world needs is more unethical people in positions of power.
> elite schools need a better way to gauge an applicant's ethics
You are perhaps mistaking which side of the line Stanford would select for. It is a school that produces and prefers sociopaths. Its engineering curriculum, almost uniquely among universities, has no requirement for an ethics course. You can fulfill Stanford's "Technology in Society" requirement by taking a course where you network with VCs for a semester. It is a factory for making jerks.
> 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.
Stanford is not a random sample of the global population. Most notably, Stanford undergraduates are young, primarily between 18-24[1]. 8.7% of people in the US from ages 18-29 have a disability [2].
Easily wayyy more than that given both the loosening standards of what a disability is combined with over-diagnosis. But I get your sentiment. When I was a kid, disabled meant you were in a wheelchair or needed someone to physically feed you, and now it means you have an Adderall prescription.
People have different ideas of what "disabled" means.
Broadening the definition makes it less useful in many ways. I would consider "disabled" to mean one of:
- Unable to ambulate effectively (requires crutches or worse)
- Unable to look after oneself as an adult (for any combination of reasons)
- Unable to use tools and items most people would consider standard - eg. can't hold a pencil, write, type, whatever.
That's a fairly harsh definition of disabled, but all of these people unambiguously require accommodation because of their incapacity. It's also off the top of my head, so I'd happily broaden it if you want to argue the point.
If I can talk to someone for an entire day and not realise or notice they are disabled in some way, I question the definition being used - how helpful is it in deciding how we should allocate additional resources and help in that case?
> However, big caveat - it's self-reported. If you look at how many people get disability benefit it's around 10%.
I don't know about the UK, but in the US, in order to get social security disability, you need to have a documented disability and there's also income limits. If you have a disability, but you manage to find a career despite the disability, you'll lose eligibility for social security disability or at least you'll lose the social security payments. Depending on the disabilities in question, I think it's reasonable that 60% of people with a disability can find work that pays enough that they are no longer eligible for a disability payment and/or they've reached the age where they get a retirement/old age insurance benefit rather than disability.
The Stanford admission process could lead to a higher percentage of people with conditions that are classified as disabilities, but give them an edge.
Albert Einstein was a smart guy and very accomplished… yet his wife had to paint is house door red so he knew where he lived. He very likely had what we would now call ASD. While he was brilliant and a top university would love people like that, he needed some accommodations, such as a red front door.
Some folks have moral concerns about AI. They include:
* The environmental cost of inference in aggregate and training in specific is non-negligible
* Training is performed (it is assumed) with material that was not consented to be trained upon. Some consider this to be akin to plagiarism or even theft.
* AI displaces labor, weakening the workers across all industries, but especially junior folks. This consolidates power into the hands of the people selling AI.
* The primary companies who are selling AI products have, at times, controversial pasts or leaders.
* Many products are adding AI where it makes little sense, and those systems are performing poorly. Nevertheless, some companies shove short AI everywhere, cheapening products across a range of industries.
* The social impacts of AI, particularly generative media and shopping in places like YouTube, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, etc are not well understood and could contribute to increased radicalization and Balkanization.
* AI is enabling an attention Gish-gallop in places like search engines, where good results are being shoved out by slop.
Hopefully you can read these and understand why someone might have moral concerns, even if you do not. (These are not my opinions, but they are opinions other people hold strongly. Please don't downvote me for trying to provide a neutral answer to this person's question.)
I'm fairly sure all the first three points are true for each new human produced. The environmental cost vs output is probably significantly higher per human, and the population continues to grow.
My experience with large companies (especially American Tech) is that they always try and deliver the product as cheap as possible, are usually evil and never cared about social impacts. And HN has been steadily complaining about the lowering of quality of search results for at least a decade.
I think your points are probably a fair snapshot of peoples moral issue, but I think they're also fairly weak when you view them in the context of how these types of companies have operated for decades. I suspect people are worried for their jobs and cling to a reasonable sounding morality point so they don't have to admit that.
Plenty of people have moral concerns with having children too.
And while some might be doing what you say, others might genuinely have a moral threshold they are unwilling to cross. Who am I to tell someone they don't actually have a genuinely held belief?
Let's put aside the fact that the person you replied to was trying to represent a diversity of views and not attribute them all to one individual, including the author of the article.
Should people not look for reasons to be concerned?
Okay. Why are we comparing a commentor answering a question to a FOSS organization who wants to align contributiors? You seem to have completely side tracked the conversation you started.
I'm not sure it's helpful to accuse "them" of bad faith, when "them" hasn't been defined and the post in question is a summary of reasons many individual people have expressed over time.
Hard agree. I work in digital accessibility, use Macs and Linux at home and work. It's unfortunate, but Linux is a long distance from how accessible Windows is. It's improving, but there's a ways to go.
It's not toxic to not offer infinite support for a platform you don't have familiarity with. Just like if you are vegan it's not toxic to refuse to prepare a meaty hamburger.
Yes, a toxic version of this exists, but simply refusing to do a thing isn't toxic.
> It's not toxic to not offer infinite support for a platform you don't have familiarity with.
OP never said he is not familiar with Windows anymore ...
He clearly said that his condition for helping them is if they install Linux. Those two are totally different statements.
I even find that a rather flimsy excuse that you made up. I do not work with MacOS, does that mean i can not help somebody with MacOS? Google kung-fu and i can figure it out. How about Linux ... OS2 lol ... If you have even a bit of basic knowledge, a OS or program is all about Googling the answer these days (or even AI / LLM answering it for you).
We can have a discussion about people being lazy and pulling the "but X family member will solve the issues with my PC/Laptop/Tablet/Smartphone". I simply taught the family members who really want to learn, how to properly Google for issues. It did not matter to me that they use MacOS, or Windows.
Same with internet security, Windows is no issue for safety as long as the people using it, know what they can open and what they can not open. The moment you teach somebody the proper way, all those "support" calls vanish as their system stays clean of viruses and bots.
The whole "i will not help you unless you install Linux" ... that is toxic behavior. Instead of helping people by actually teaching them the basics, and those basics are operating system agnostic... his solution is a bit of blackmail.
If that's making it difficult for you to understand the comparison, I can select another. I think most folks could understand the analogy, but I'm happy to accommodate you if it's unclear.
Better? No absolutely not. Capable? Without a doubt. I have a multi bay nas and it's like 1/6the the size of my pc case. My nas also makes removing and replacing drives trivial. There's a million guides online for my particular nas already and software written with it in mind. It also draws a lot less power than my gaming pc and has a lot quieter operation.
It's difficult for me to accept it's better given all the above.
Which is an unreasonable claim.
I have a disability that impairs many aspects of my life. I was still capable of getting through college and am successful in my career. Having a disability does not mean you can't do academics.