> 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) exclusively to get a single room. Moreover, residential accommodations allow you to be placed in housing prior to the general population and thus grant larger (& better) housing selection.
I would not be surprised if a majority of the cited Stanford accommodations were not used for test taking but instead used exclusively for housing (there are different processes internally for each).
edit: there is even a practice of "stacking" where certain disabilities are used to strategically reduce the subset of dorms in which you can live, to the point where the only intersection between your requirements is a comfy single, forcing Admin to put you there. It is well known, for example, that a particularly popular dorm is the nearest to the campus clinic. If you can get an accommodation requiring proximity to the clinic, you have narrowed your choices to that dorm or another. One more accommodation and you are guaranteed the good dorm.
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 quality, isn't that a problem with Stanford's definitions, not with "cheating"?
> a problem with Stanford's definitions
Only if students aren't lying on their application.
That sounds loaded with a lot of value judgment. I don't think it's inappropriate for you to suggest it, but I think you'll find that a lot of people who value equitability, collaboration, communalism, modesty, earnestness, or conservation of resources might not share that perspective with you.
It turns out that people just disagree about values and are going to weigh judgment on others based on what they believe. You don't have to share their values, but you do kind of just need to be able to accept that judgment as theirs when you do things they malign.
I'm glad you had no problem with "dumpster fuck".
You don’t have to return your shopping cart. You don’t have to donate to the collection plate. You don’t have to give a coworker recognition.
But when everyone has an adversarial “get mine” attitude the systems have to be changed. Instead of assuming good intent they have to enforce it. Enforcement is very expensive and very unpleasant. (For example, maybe you need to rent the shopping cart.)
Unfortunately enforcement is a self fulfilling cycle. When people see others cheating they feel they need to cheat just to not be left behind.
You may be from a culture where this is the norm. Reflect on its impact and how we would really like to avoid this.
Once you grow up, you realize your parents were human, made self-interested decisions, and then told themselves stories that made their actions sound principled. Some more than others, of course.
That point is probably behind someone at Stanford.
Hey, if they stop using the money I donate to advertise that my neighbors are abominations in the eyes of God they can have my money again.
So, yeah: that morality did exist, and not just in fables.
If someone says they cheated in school, the first thing that pops into your head probably isn’t that they might have gotten a single dorm room, right?
This is not in alignment with "equitability, collaboration, communalism, modesty, earnestness, or conservation of resources"
People claim those values but rarely actually follow them.
In many ways Stanford is preparing students for the real world by encouraging cheating.
That seems like an important distinction, and makes the rest of the article (which focuses on educational accommodations) look mistaken.
It isn't, but if I'm on the hiring end and I know you play games like this, I'm not hiring you. I can work with less competent folks much better.
All it takes is a lack of principles, exaggerating a bit, and getting a letter from a doctor. Imagine you have poor eyesight requiring a substantial correction, but you can still drive. That's not a disability. Now, if you create a compelling story inflating how this had an adverse impact on your education and get support letters, you might successfully cheat the system.
I have seen several such cases. The admissions system is not effectively dealing with this type of fraud. In my opinion, a more serious audit-based system is necessary. Applicants that claim to be disabled but that are not recognized as such by the Government should go through some extra checks.
Otherwise, we end up in the current situation where truly disabled students are extremely rare, but we have a large corpus of unscrupulous little Machiavelli, which is also worrying on its own sake.
(when I say "Trump's America" I don't directly mean Trump himself, though he's certainly a prominent example of it. It feels like it's everywhere. One of the first times I really noticed it was the Netflix show "Inventing Anna". A dramatization of the real life story of a scammer, Anna Sorokin. Netflix paid her $320,000 for her story. She led a life of crime and successfully profited from it. Now she's been on Dancing with the Stars, essentially she's been allowed to become the celebrity she pretended to be.)
HN itself and startup culture celebrate breaking the rules and laws to earn money. It is ok to break the law if you are rich enough. People here were defending gambling apps despite all the shady stuff they do just a few weeks ago.
The white collar crime was barely prosecuted before, now the DOJ is loosing even the ability to prosecute it. So, I think the effect you worry about already happened, long time ago.
It absolutely is a disability! The fact that it's easy to deal with it doesn't change that fact.
I would not find it credible that it has a real impact on education though.
It should be expected that some portion of the teenage population sees a net-benefit from Amphetamines for the duration of late high school/college. It's unlikely that that net-benefit holds for the rest of their lives.
Schools and universities have made accommodations a priority for decades. It started with good intentions, but parents and students alike have noticed that it's both a) easy to qualify for a disability and b) provides significant academic advantages if you do.
Another big accommodation request is extra time on tests. At many high schools and universities, getting more time than your peers to take tests is as simple as finding a doctor who will write the write things in a note for you. Some universities grant special permissions to record lectures to students with disabilities, too.
If you don't have a disability, you aren't allowed to record lectures and you have to put your pencil down at the end of the normal test window. As you can imagine, when a high percentage of the student body gets to stay longer for a hard test, the wheels start turning in students' heads as they realize cheating is being normalized and they're being left behind by not getting that doctors' note.
The rampant abuse is really becoming a problem for students with true disabilities. As you can imagine, when the disability system is faced with 1/3 of the student body registering for disability status the limited number of single rooms and other resources will inevitably get assigned to people who don't need it while some who actually do need it are forced to go without.
It's much harder to fake deafness or blindness to get that extra housing and exam benefits.
Also, there are academic components to disability cheating. As the article notes, registering for a disability at some of these universities grants you additional time to take tests.
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 harm. If that ostensible harm isn't reflected in reality, and there is a net benefit in having a certain age group accelerate (and, presumably, deepen) their education, perhaps this type of overwhelming regulatory control is a mistake. In that sense, it's a shame that these policies are imposed federally, as comparative data would be helpful.
The definition of disability is pretty wide. I have an emotional support animal but if it wasn't for the housing requirement I probably wouldn't have declared anything. I do have diagnosed depression[0] and ADHD. I tend to not be open about these unless it is relevant to the conversation and I don't really put it down in job applications or other questionnaires. But being more socially acceptable I also believe more people are getting diagnosed AND more people are putting an accurate mark on those questionnaires. I can absolutely tell you many people lie on these and I'd bet there are *far* more false negatives than false positives. Social stigma should suggest that direction of bias...
I say this because I really dislike Reason[1]. There's an element of truth in there, but they are also biased and using that truth to paint an inaccurate narrative. Reason says I've made this part of my identity, but that couldn't be further from the truth. What they're aware of and using to pervert the narrative is that our measurements have changed. That's a whole other conversation than what they said and they get to sidestep several more important questions.
[rant]
Also, people are getting diagnosed more! I can't tell you why everyone has a diagnosis these days, but I can say why I got my ADHD diagnosis at the age of 30 (depression was made pretty young). For one, social stigma has changed. I used to completely hide my depression and ADHD. Now that it is more acceptable I will openly discuss it when the time is right, but it's not like I'm proud of my depression or ADHD. But there is also the fact that the world has changed and what used to be more manageable became not. Getting treated changed my life for the better, but the modern world and how things are going have changed things for the worse. Doing a PhD is no joke[2], doing it in a pandemic is crazy, doing it in a ML boom (and researching ML) is harder, and doing it with an adversarial advisor is even worse. On top of that the world is just getting more difficult to navigate for me. Everything is trying to grab my attention and I have to be far more defensive about it. Instead of being in an office where I can signal "work mode" and "open to talk mode" with a door I get pings on slack by people who want to be synchronous with an asynchronous communication platform, messaging "hey"[3] and nothing else. A major issue with ADHD is triage, because everything seems like an emergency. If you're constantly pinging me and I can't signal that I need to be left alone, then that just drives the anxiety up. This is only worsened by the fact that Slack's notification system is, at best, insufferable[4]. So I don't know about everyone else, but I'm absolutely not surprised that other peoples' anxiety is shooting through the roof. We haven't even mentioned politics, economics, or many other things I know you're all thinking about.
[/rant]
So yeah, there's the housing issue and I do think that's worth talking about (it's true for an apartment too[5]). I'd gladly pay the pet deposit and extra money per month for a pet. It is never an option, so people go "nuclear". BUT ALSO I think we should have a different conversation about the world we're actually creating and how it is just making things difficult. The world is complicated, no surprise, but our efforts to oversimplify things are just making it more complicated. I really just wish we'd all get some room to breathe and rethink some things. I really wish we could just talk like normal human beings and stop fighting, blaming, and pointing fingers as if there's some easy to dismiss clear bad guy. There's plenty of times where there is, but more often there is no smoking gun. I know what an anxiety feedback loop looks like and I really don't know why we want the whole world to do this. They fucking suck! I don't want to be in one! Do you?
[0] My mom passed away when I was a pre-teen. I think no one is surprised nor doubts this diagnosis.
[1] I'm also not a big fan of The Atlantic. Both are highly biased
[2] I actually think a PhD should be a great place for ADHD people. Or research in general. Many of us get sucked down rabbit holes and see things from a different point of view. These can be major advantages in research and science. But these are major hurdles when the academic framework is to publish or perish. There's no ability to get depth or chase rabbit holes. I was always compared to peers who published 50 papers in a year as if that is a good thing. (Yeah, the dude did a lot of work and he should be proud, but those papers are obviously shallow. He should be proud, but we also need nuance in how we evaluate. https://youtube.com/shorts/rDk_LsON3CM)
[3] https://youtu.be/OF_5EKNX0Eg?t=8
[4] Thanks, I really needed that phone notification to a message I responded to an hour ago. Thanks, I really needed that notification to a muted channel. Thanks, I really needed that notification to a random thread I wasn't mentioned in and have never sent a single message in. Thanks, I'm glad I didn't get a notification to that @godelski in #general or #that-channel-I-admin. Does slack even care about what my settings say?
[5] My hypothesis is that the no pet clauses are put in because people use templates. And justified because one bad experience gets shared and sits in peoples heads stronger than the extra money in their pockets.
This is not entirely their fault. Stanford is subject to Santa Clara County building regulations, and those tend not to be friendly to large university developments (or any large developments for that matter).
I vaguely recall the recent Escondido Graduate Village Residences (EVGR) construction taking a while to get through the regulatory pipeline.
The true underlying issue here is just that there is not enough quality housing for the number of students Stanford admits.
If I was the university I would prefer these types of disabled students. Why not:
1. They are not really disabled, so I do not have to spend a lot of many for real accommodations
2. No need to deal with a higher chance (I’m guessing here) of academic difficulties
3. Basically, I hit disability metric without paying any cost!
There is no conclusive research on humans, but you have these backwards. Ritalin (methylphenidate) is thought to have less risk for neurotoxicity than Adderall (amphetamine). Amphetamine enters the neuron and disrupts some internal functions as part of its mechanism of action, while Ritalin does not.
Both drugs will induce tolerance, though. The early motivation-enhancing effects don't last very long.
There are also some entertaining studies where researchers give one group of students placebo and another group of students Adderall, then have them self-rate their performance. The Adderall group rates themselves as having done much better, despite performing the same on the test. If you've ever seen the confidence boost that comes from people taking their first stimulant doses, this won't come as a big surprise. These early effects (euphoria, excess energy) dissipate with long-term treatment, but it fools a lot of early users and students who borrow a couple pills from a friend.
The people in the twins were not happy - they hadn't asked for them.
I knew one person who dropped out in the first 3 months (for mental purposes), and that was someone who shared a room.
In the workplace, I saw the same folks struggle to work consistently without abusive dosages of such drugs. A close friend eventually went into in-patient care for psychosis due to his interaction with Adderall.
Like any drug, the effect wears off - Cognitive Behavioral Therapy matches prescription drugs at treating ADHD after 5 years. As I recall, the standard dosages of Adderall cease to be effective after 7-10 years due to changes in tolerance. Individuals trying to maintain the same therapeutic effect will either escalate their usage beyond "safe" levels or revert to their unmedicated habits.
Like what's the point of having the test be time constrained? If there is no point, then just let everyone have more time. If there is a point to having the test be time constrained, then aren't we just holding one group to a lower standard than another group? Why is that good?
Same question about lectures. Is there a reason everyone can't record the lectures? If so, then why do we have different standards?
I think at the college level, grades should in some sense reflect your proficiency at a given topic. An "A" in calculus should mean that you can do calculus and that evaluation should be independent of your own strengths, weaknesses, disabilities, genetic predisposition to it, and so on. Imagine an extreme example: someone is in a car crash, suffers brain damage, and is now unable to do calculus. This is tragic. But I don't also feel that it now makes sense to let them do their tests open book or whatever to accommodate for that. As a society we should do whatever we can to support this individual and help them live their best life. But I don't see how holding them to a lower standard on their college exams accomplishes that.
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.
Yep. Speaking from experience, top colleges will give students with ADHD or similar conditions as much as double time or more on exams. One college I know of sends them to a disability services office to proctor it, in which they simply don't enforce time limits at all.
Coincidentally, there's an overwhelming number of students with ADHD compared to before these kinds of accommodations became standard.
Tests usually measure lots of things, and speed and accuracy / fluency in the topic is one.
It certainly shouldn't be entirely a race either though.
Also if a test is time constrained it's easier to mark. Give a failing student 8 hours and they'll write 30 pages of nonsense.
Edit: To be clear there’s a lot of argument from incredulity or “obviously something is wrong,” without doing the work to establish that.
In contrast, special-casing few disadvantaged students is a local decisions every school or university could make independently, and initially it was an easy sell - a tiny exception to help a fraction of people whom life treated particularly hard. Nobody intended for that to eventually apply to 1/3 of all students - but this is just the usual case of a dynamic system adjusting to compensate.
The original article said 38% students are registered with the disability office, not that 38% of students have accommodations.
Not all students registered with the disability office receive accommodations all of the time.
25% is still a very, very high number. The number of public universities is in the 3-4% range. From the article:
> According to Weis’s research, only 3 to 4 percent of students at public two-year colleges receive accommodations, a proportion that has stayed relatively stable over the past 10 to 15 years.
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 Stanford (or any other school) has full control to do whatever they want.
Rising disability rates are not limited to the Ivy League.
A close friend of mine is faculty at a medium sized university and specializes in disability accommodations. She is also deaf. Despite being very bright and articulate, she had a tough time in university, especially lecture-heavy undergrad. In my eyes, most of the students she deals with are "young and disorganized" rather than crippled. Their experience of university is wildly different from hers. Being diagnosed doesn't immediately mean you should be accommodated.
The majority of student cases receive extra time on exams and/or attendance exemptions. But the sheer volume of these cases take away a lot of badly needed time and funding for students who are talented, but are also blind or wheelchair bound. Accommodating this can require many months of planning to arrange appropriate lab materials, electronic equipment, or textbooks.
As the article mentions, a deeply distorted idea of normal is being advanced by the DSM (changing ADHD criteria) as well as social media (enjoying doodling, wearing headphones a lot, putting water on the toothbrush before toothpaste. These and many other everyday things are suggested signs of ADHD/autism/OCD/whatever). This is a huge problem of its own. Though it is closely related to over-prescribing education accommodations, it is still distinct.
Unfortunately, psychological-education assessments are not particularly sensitive. They aren't good at catching pretenders and cannot distinguish between a 19 year old who genuinely cannot develop time management skills despite years of effort & support, and one who is still developing them fully. Especially after moving out and moving to a new area with new (sub)cultures.
Occasionally, she sees documents saying "achievement is consistent with intelligence", a polite way of saying that a student isn't very smart, and poor grades are not related to any recognized learning disability. Really and truly, not everyone needs to get an undergrad degree.
Maybe the real problem is we are testing people on how fast they can do something not if they can do something.
In general, being good at academics require you to think carefully not quickly. I suspect there is a correlation between people who think things through and people who do well in school.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean - but I think almost any college student would disagree with this presumption.
> Do you have a source for the benefits giving way to problems long-term?
Although a very long read, I found this to be very insightful:
> It was still true that after 14 months of treatment, the children taking Ritalin behaved better than those in the other groups. But by 36 months, that advantage had faded completely, and children in every group, including the comparison group, displayed exactly the same level of symptoms.
https://archive.is/20250413091646/https://www.nytimes.com/20...
https://oae.stanford.edu/students/dispelling-myths-about-oae
it's 25% registered, not 38%. How do you get this number wrong when Stanford has it on their website? how does that even happen?
this number includes literally every type of possible accommodation. A shitty carpet in your room is included, an accommodation for a peanut allergy is included. This is a 90 plus a year private school, I think it's fine that you can get a shitty carpet replaced in a way maybe you couldn't at University of Akron ? what's the problem? it's a nothingnburger.
the point is the article is somehow implying that 38% of students get some weird special treatment but that just is not the case
Sure that makes sense to me, but I don't see why this would not also apply to ADHD students or any other group.
And of course, there needs to be some time limit. All I am saying is, instead of having a group that gets one hour and another group that gets two hours, just give everyone two hours.
I meant "constrained" not in the sense of having a limit at all, but in the sense that often tests are designed in such a way that it is very common that takers are unable to finish in the allotted time. If this constraint serves some purpose (i.e. speed is considered to be desirable) then I don't see why that purpose doesn't apply to everyone.
It’s like stack ranking within companies that always fire the bottom 20%. Everyone will do whatever they can to be in the top 80% and it continues to get worse every year. Job conditions are not improving every year - they are continually getting worse and that’s due to the issue that we just don’t have enough jobs.
This country doesn’t build anything anymore and we are concentrating all the wealth and power into the hands of a few. This leaves the top 1% getting richer every year and the bottom 99% fighting over a smaller piece of the pie every year.
At the end of the day setting up a system where different students have different criteria for succeeding, automatically incentivizes students to find the easiest criteria for themselves.
If you can't do calculus, extra time is not going to help you. Its not like an extra 30 minutes in a closed room environment is going to let you rederrive calculus from first principles.
The theory behind these accomedations is that certain people are disadvantaged in ways that have nothing to do with the thing being evaluated.
The least controversial version would be someone that is blind gets a braile version of the test (or someone to read it to them, etc). Sure you can say that without the accomadations the blind student cannot do calculus like the other students can, but you are really just testing if they can see the question not if they "know" calculus. The point of the test is to test their ability at calculus not to test if their eyes work.
The "1 in 4" number has been there as far back as Wayback Machine has that paged archived (2023): http://web.archive.org/web/20230628165315/https://oae.stanfo...
So it's definitely not a precise statistic, and it's likely out of date.
Why are you trying to measure speed though?
I can't think of any situation where someone was like: you have exactly 1 minute to integrate this function, or else.
Fluency yes, but speed is a poor proxy for fluency.
Some recent examples where large segments of the population did this are 1) with medical marijuana cards, which make weed legal to anyone willing to claim to have anxiety or difficulty sleeping, or 2) emotional support animals on airlines, where similarly one can claim anything to get a prescription that, if travelling with a pet, opts them out of the sometimes-fatal always-unpleasant cargo hold travel.
Plenty of people would call either of these cheating, but kind of like how "language is usage", so are morals in a society. If everyone is doing something that is available but "cheating", that society deems the result for people sufficiently valuable.
If as you say the number of available positions is constrained, this system does nothing to increase the supply of those positions. It also does nothing increase the likelihood that those positions are allocated to those with the greatest material need. This is Stanford; I am sure many of the disabled students at Stanford are in the 1%.
it's on their website. Along with all the other details. where is 38% coming from that is a better source than Stanford's own website. At a minumum the article should have said where they got that number and why it disagrees with Stanford's own number.
And again, it includes every possible kind of accommodation under the sun. Which is totally fine and not an issue of any kind.
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.
In general, timed tests that involve a lot of handwriting are appalling. We use them because they make classroom management easier, not because they are justifiable pedagogy.
A few examples: competitive tests based on adapting the questions to see how "deep" an individual can get within a specific time. IRL there are lots of tasks that need to be done well and quickly; a correct plodder isn't acceptable.
But extra test time is fundamentally different, as it would be of value to anyone taking the test.
If getting the problems in Braille helps the student demonstrate their ability to do Calculus, we give them the test in Braille. If getting 30 minutes of extra time helps all students demonstrate their ability to do calculus, why don't we just give it to all students then?
The National Center for Education Statistics disagrees with 3-4%.
In 2019–20, some 21 percent of undergraduates and 11 percent of
postbaccalaureate students reported having a disability. . .
Taking what is currently scheduled as a three hour exam which many students already leave after 2, and for which some have accommodations allowing them 4 hours, and just setting aside up to five hours for it for everyone, likely makes the exam a fairer test of knowledge (as opposed to a test of exam skills and pressured time management) for everyone.
Once you’ve answered all the problems, or completed an essay, additional time isn’t going to make your answers any better. So you can just get up and leave when you’re done.
Maybe, but my single data point: I'm on the board for a condo corporation and even though we spend a lot of time dealing with pet policies and the damage pets (read: dogs) cause, we have a total of ZERO pets registered (and paying the monthly fee), and these are overwhelmingly owners not renters who might be excluded from having pets to begin with.
Joel Spolsky explained this well about what makes a good programmer[1]. "If the basic concepts aren’t so easy that you don’t even have to think about them, you’re not going to get the big concepts."
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guid...
So let's say you have a generally fair time bonus for mild (clinical) anxiety. The issue is that it's fair for the average mild anxiety, it's an advantage if a student has extremely mild anxiety.
As you say, hopefully the test is not overly time focused, but it's still an advantage, and a lot of these students / parents will go for every advantage they can.
I'm not endorsing the specific behavior, but I am pointing out that if there's a "cheating" lever anyone can pull to improve their own situation, it will get pulled if people think it's justified.
There's plenty that do get pulled and plenty that don't. In the US, SNAP fraud is sufficiently close to nonexistant that you can't tell the difference in benefits provided. But fraud surrounding lying about medical conditions to get a medical marijuana card is universal and accepted.
The people we're talking about here are teenagers that are told "if you have an ADHD diagnosis you can ask for and get your own room". The sort of systems thinking you are describing is not generally done by your average fresh high school graduate. This is therefore a Stanford problem.
And frankly, with HN praising Uber, Tesla and the rest of SV constantly breaking laws and rules companies, again, those students are practically saints.
OP worried about this:
> Once a critical mass of people start to feel that way (if they don't already) it'll have a devastating effect on society.
Trump winning second time, the people who lead government and GOP, the critical mass thing already happened. There was no moral already among significant share of population. Trying to pearl clutch over students is almost funny in that context.
Cognitive behavioral therapy does excel at treating ADHD! But 5 years of therapy is what, 16 times more expensive than 5 years of medication? Maybe more? Not to mention the time commitment.
They could have made it up, but since the article is a couple days old and no one has printed any retraction or correction, I'm more inclined to believe the number is accurate.
For those wondering, the honor code was changed to make all exams proctored because of a number of academic dishonesty issues that happened allegedly.
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 performance.
“Cognitive behavioral therapy matches insulin after 5 years”
(because they die - so they’re no longer counted)
* You have a disability that hinders your ability to type on a keyboard, so you need extra time to type the essay based exam through vocal transcription.
* You broke your dominant hand (accidents happen) so even though you know all of the material, you just can't write fast enough within normal "reasonable" time limits.
* You are blind, you need some way to be able to read the questions in the test. People who can see normally shouldn't need those accommodations.
I don't think those are cases where you are lowering the bar. Not by more than you are allowing the test taker a fairer chance, anyway.
The problem is when you get into the gray area where it's not clear than an accommodation should be given.
I guess it’s probably high variance. My roomate was a great dude. I can easily see how it could go the other way.
N in M fractions are used in casual copy to convey an approximate value. Finding a "1 in 4" number on a dated website does not mean that the current number is literally 25%.
It's an approximation and not meant to be taken as a precise value. They're not going to update the website to "26 out of 100" if the number changes.
Citing an old, approximate number in some non-specific website copy does not invalidate anything.
1. some of the things they list as "disabilities" are sicknesses which _can_ be disabling but not per see disabilities
2. all of the things listed aren't one/off but have not just huge gradients, but huge variations. You might be afflicted in a way which "disables" you from living a normal live or job but still might be able to handle university due to how it differs.
3. non of the things list is per-see/directly reducing your ability to have deep understanding in a specialized field. ADHD sometimes comes with hyper focus, which if it manifest in the right way can help you in university. It's also might make more "traditionally structured jobs" hardly possible for you and bad luck with how professors handle their courses is more likely to screw you over. Anxiety is often enough more topic specific, e.g. social anxiety. This means it can be disabling for many normal jobs but not affect you in universities which don't require you physical presence, but if they do you basically wait out the course and then learn after being back home. In rare cases it can also help with crunch learning before an exam. Etc. etc.
Actually if we go a step future all of the named health issues can make it more likely for you to end up in high standard universities. Hyper focus on specific topics from ADHD might have started your journey into science even as a child. Anxiety might have lead to you studying more. Since might have been an escape from a painful reality which later lead to you developing depression.
If we consider how high standard universities can cause a lot of stress which can cause an out brake of anxiety or depression in some people it just is another data point why we would expect higher number of health issues (if you lump a bunch of very different issues together like they do).
Later they then also throw in autism in the list of mental issues, even through autism always had been higher represented in academia due to how it sometimes comes with "special interests" and make socializing as a child harder, i.e. it can lead to a child very early and very long term focusing on scientific topics out of their fully own interest. (But it doesn't have to, it can also thoroughly destroy you live to a point "learning to cope with it" isn't possible anymore and you are basically crippled as long as you don't luck out massively with your job and environment.)
Honestly the whole article has a undertone of people with "autism, ADHD, anxiety, depression" shouldn't be "elite" university and any accommodations for them should be cut.
Now to be fair accommodations have to be reasonable and you have to learn to cope with your issues. Idk. how they are handled in the US, but from what I have seen in the EU that is normally the case. E.g. with dyslexia and subtle nerve damage making hand writing harder I could have gotten a slight time extensions for any non-multiple choice exams. I didn't bother because it didn't matter all (but one) exams where done in a way where if you know the topic well you can finish in 60-70% of the time and if you don't even 3x time would not help you much (and the extension was like flat 15min). That is except if my nerve damage or dyslexia where worse then I really would have needed the time, not for solving questions but for writing down answers. There was one exam which tested more if you had crammed in all knowledge then testing understanding, in that exam due to dyslexia and my hands not being able to write quite as fast as normal I actually last some points, not because I didn't know but because I wasn't able to write fast enough.
The point here is if done well people which don't need accommodations shouldn't have a huge benefits even if they get them, but people needing it not getting it can mean punishing them for thing unrelated to actual skills. Live will do so enough after university, no need to force it into universities which should focus on excellence of knowledge and understanding.
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 request letters to anyone who makes an appointment and asks nicely.
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.
Once it becomes widely known that getting a diagnosis is the meta-game to getting housing priority, nicer rooms, extra time on tests, and other benefits the numbers climb rapidly. When the number is approaching 38%, the system has become broken.
It's a real problem for the students who really need these accommodations. When 38% of the students qualify for "priority" housing, you're still in competition with 1/3 of the student body for those limited resources.
I think someone misunderstood, or they were telling you a lie.
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.
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.
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.
But most importantly, the OR plays a big role here. Where is the data on how many people are using academic accommodations ? Complaining that people at a 90k a year school receive a housing accommodation is just frankly absurd. The article heavily implies that people are somehow using these accommodations to gain an academic advantage, when in fact 24% of people use any kind of accommodation, which includes dirty carpet replacement.
- why would you get a single, for ADHD, non-social-related anxiety, non-sever autism or depression (especially in the later case you probably shouldn't be in a single)
- I mean sure social anxiety, sever autism can be good reasons for a single.
through in general the whole US dorms thing is strange to me (in the EU there are dorms, but optional (in general). And 50%+ of studentsfind housing outside of it (but depends on location). This allows for a lot more individualized living choices.)
If thinking speed is not important, why are we evaluating it at all?
I counter: If students are requesting specific accommodations en-mass, maybe schools should rethink overall decisions. Maybe housing shouldn't be shared. Maybe the workload should be relaxed.
Disabilities are far more commonplace than you might imagine. The number of disabled people per 1,000 likely hasn't changed, but our recognition of disabilities such as autism, anxiety disorders, etc. has gotten better.
I'm sure a very small amount of folks do abuse the system, but I'd bet money that most actually have disabilities.
If you still think otherwise, think again: I was diagnosed with ADHD in my mid 30s, and with autism in my mid 40s. This is through extended, multiple hour testing. Nobody told me I had these issues. I was simply told I was a terrible person that didn't do his school work and behaved poorly at school. Now, with an understanding of autism, ADHD, and the new anxiety disorder I have thanks to a recent brain injury, I'm able to finally address this stuff.
I also aced higher level, computer centric stuff, and set a record for one of the quickest to graduate in my state at a technical school (2 months instead of 2 years).
Bottom line is that you should not be making poor assumptions about people abusing the system without evidence to prove it.
"Hyperfocus" is a clinical term for focus that is excessive enough to be an impairment. People often conflate it with the term "Special interest" used for Autism, but it's completely different, it refers to the inability to pull focus away from something despite wanting and needing to. It is, definitionally, without benefit. If there's a benefit, it's not hyperfocus.
Which makes sense, if you think about it. ADHD is characterized by poor ability to direct attention. People know about it causing a lack of attention to things that need attention, but it can also cause attention to things that don't need it.
On the bright side, i met my spouse and we’ve been together for 10+ years so not all bad lol.
I’m a slow reader. Do i have a disability? Who cares - i can still read well and did OK at school, that’s all that matters.
People that game the system in this way are basically frauds. They take resources that are intended to benefit people that ARE struggling with basic life skills in some way.
https://disability.utexas.edu/statistics/
https://irp.osu.edu/sites/default/files/documents/2025/01/20...
They lasted me 12 years so far. Same dosage.
> The Adderall group rates themselves as having done much better, despite performing the same on the test.
A feeling of euphoria means your dosage is too high, and people without ADHD probably shouldn’t take these drugs.
If the studies involved people that were on the drugs normally, it’s also not a particularly surprising result. The drugs induce a very real chemical dependency, and you will not feel like yourself or that you are performing when you are off of them.
That is honestly my only complaint. Without the drug, I am essentially a vegetable. If I go cold turkey, I can barely stay awake. However, it’s still a lot better than my life was before.
They could extend the test time for everyone, but in reality, you won't get many time extensions in real life, where speed is indeed a factor.
If someone can do 21 correct answers in an hour and someone else needed two hours to do the same, due to a faked disability, it's unfair both to the 1-hour student and an actually disabled student who might be missing a hand and needing more time to write/type with a prosthetic.
I do feel like a test that is so focused on speed rather than ability seems like it loses a lot of its utility. There's a bunch of math I can't do. It doesn't matter if you give me an hour or two -- I won't be able to do it. But distinguishing between the ability to solve a problem in 30s versus 40s seems to be missing the point.
1) Someone who registers may not provide sufficient documentation to be eligible for accommodation 2) Not all disabilities require housing or academic accommodation - instead they may get things like parking passes, transportation and assistive technology 3) Returning students could have requested accommodation in prior years, but no longer require/desire it 4) What "registration" is could be something different than registering with the OAE 5) The number could be wrong or misleading.
> Complaining that people at a 90k a year school receive a housing accommodation is just frankly absurd.
Personally, I don't think complaints about defrauding schools are absurd because of tuition costs. Frankly, that anyone thinks fraud is ethical for the wealthy is disturbing.
The point is that everyone who gets a single is super happy about it the same way that a drug addict is always happy when they get their drug of choice for free: of course it’s great. Of course it isn’t the best thing for you in the long run. I say this as someone who hated being in a double my first year and spent the next three in a single.
As far as I am concerned having apartments of 4-8 students where each has their own small room but shares a common space is ideal. But usually this is reserved for sophomore year and later.
This means that someone fully abled can think about and solve problems for 1h and 50 minutes, and use 10 minutes to physically write/type the answers, and someone with a disability (eg. missing a hand, using a prosthetic) only gets eg. one hour to solve the problems and one hour to write/type the answers due to the disablity making them write/type more slowly.
Same for eg. someone blind, while with proper eyesight, you might read a question in 30 seconds, someone blind reading braille might need multiple minutes to read the same text.
With unlimited time this would not be a problem, but since speed is graded too (since it's important), this causes differences in grades.
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?
That seems like a big assumption that i don't believe is true in general.
I think its true at an individual level, as you learn more about a subject you will become faster at it. I don't think its true when comparing between different people. Especially if you throw learning disabilities into the mix which is often just code for strong in one area and weak in another, e.g. smart but slow.
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 interested in science and engineering enough to get credentialed in it being a signifier of autism was just sheer lunacy.
It really is frustrating how fast our society devalues and dilutes the meaning of any word these days.
But to quote the article linked in the parent comment:
> The increase is driven by more young people getting diagnosed with conditions such as ADHD, anxiety, and depression, and by universities making the process of getting accommodations easier.
These disabilities are more complex for multiple reasons.
One is the classification criteria. A broken hand or blindness is fairly discrete, anxiety is not. All people experience some anxiety; some experience very little, some people a great deal, and everything in between. The line between regular anxiety and clinical anxiety is inherently fuzzy. Further, a clinical anxiety diagnosis is usually made on the basis of patient questionnaires and interviews where a patient self-reports their symptoms. This is fine in the context of medicine, but if patients have an incentive to game these interviews (like more test time), it is pretty trvial to game a GAD-7 questionnaire for the desired outcome. There are no objective biomarkers we can use to make a clinical anxiety diagnosis.
Another is the scope of accommodation. The above examples have an accommodation narrowly tailored to the disability in a way that maintains fairness. Blind users get a braille test that is of no use to other students anyway. A student with a broken hand might get more time on an eassy test, but presumably would receive no extra time on a multiple choice test and their accommodation is for a period of months, not indefinite.
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? Or DMV workers?
and I'm aware that people with ADHD don't really have any way to direct it
and that it can easily lead to them neglecting everything from them self, over work to social relationships
so it will help more then it hurts in university
but it still can matter before, even if it's just a parent mistaking a hyper focus on some science topic with a special interest in it and then exposing you to more science related stuff earlier one in life
> The increase is driven by more young people getting diagnosed with conditions such as ADHD, anxiety, and depression, and by universities making the process of getting accommodations easier.
I think these disabilities are more complex than the broken hand and blindness examples for reasons I commented on elsewhere in this thread. In your example, a student with depression or clinical anxiety presumably only needs the same 10 minutes to write/type the answers as all the other students. Which means the extra time is added for them to "think about and solve problems." That seems fundamentally different to me than the broken hand example.
That depends on how the test is designed.
Some tests have more material than anyone can hope to finish. Extra time is always valuable in such a test.
However that type of test is generally bad because it more measures speed then skill.
Most tests are designed so the average person is able to finish all the questions. In those tests more time for the average person is not helpful. They have already done it. Sure they could maybe redo all the questions, but there is very diminishing returns.
If the extra 30 minutes improves someone who needs the accomedation's score by 50%, and increases the average student's score by 2% or even not at all, clearly the same thing isn't going on.
So i would disagree that extra time helps everyone.
Just think about it - when was the last time you had a final exam where literally every person handed in the exam at the last moment. When i was in school, the vast majority of people handed in their exam before the time limit.
> why don't we just give it to all students then?
I actually think we should. Requiring people to get special accomedations biases the system to people comfortable with doing that. We should just let everyone get the time they need.
It is actually very informative when one person can
Do humanities have to do handwritten essay tests in the modern world. I had to do those in middle school/high school. No idea if that is still a thing.
Wat? I had no idea I had a disability!
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/
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.
> 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...
I always think of the SMBC "old physicist" comic: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21
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.
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.
Wouldn't say this is an accurate description of the US economy.
https://realtimeinequality.org/?id=wealth&wealthend=03012023...
The students hated the infinite time ones, because nobody knew how much time other students spent on the test so one felt obliged to spend inordinate amounts of time on it.
Besides, if you couldn't solve the exam problems in 2 hours, you simply didn't know the material.
And then remember to drink water, exercise and get enough sleep.
The exams I took were done in blue books where you were required to show your work.
But… it's not addictive at all. Taking it made me not want to take it again. I was just like damn, I kind of smell like sulfur now.
- A study with a sample a size < 50
- A study that says that medication improves outcomes over CBT
- A study that says that evidence for CBT improving ADHD symptoms comes from studies with such small sample sizes that the conclusions could be the result of bias
The only way someone could conclude “CBT has the same outcome as medication” from the studies you linked to would be to not read them. The first two don’t really say that and the third one literally refutes that position.
I've never seen that come down to processing speed. Even as a programmer -- I can program probably 10x faster than most of my peers in straight programming contest style programs. But in terms of actual real work -- I'm probably slightly faster. But my value is really I spend a lot of time really understanding the ask and impact of the work I'm doing -- asking good questions, articulating what I'm delivering, etc...
That is, my faster processing speed results in very little added benefit. That is, time to deliver results can matter. Processing speed typically is a very small percentage of that time. And for these tests processing speed is often the main distinction. It's not like they're distinguishing one kid who can't solve this equation and another kid who can. It's generally more likely one kid can finish all 25 questions in 32 minutes and the other would take 38 minutes so they only finish 23 of them in the allotted 32. I don't think that ends up mattering in any real way.
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.)
I didn't because I'd use the extra time to go over my answers again looking for errors.
I'm curious, is this a few bad owners ruining it for everyone or commonplace. My suspicion is the former, as those things typically follow power distributions.
But I think the complete lack of options forces people's hands. If you're a pet owner, what do you do? The option of paying a pet deposit and monthly fee is either simply not available or extremely limited. So I think it is a bit natural that the abuse of the ESA system happened. My options are get rid of my cat or get an ESA. It's an obvious choice. And with the ESA you cannot deny me rent nor charge extra. That's why I call it the nuclear option. I've always offered to pay a deposit but when told there's a no pet policy it turns into "oh, sorry, I 'forgot' to mention she's an ESA". Most people I know with ESAs never make the first offer.
Truth is that there was an arms race and the pet owners won. The question now is if it is more profitable to charge for pets or get no extra money for ESAs. Either way people will not give up their pets. I have a legitimate rec but I know you can get them for pretty cheap. So whats the move from here? I suspect the best move is for landlords to at least try to get money for the pets that are there anyways.
Note: the ESA issue is only a minor part of my comment. I don't personally care about this issue beyond keeping my cat. But the other uses I'm much more concerned about
I thought I was just being logical, but apparently I also have a deficit of attention. Okay, then. I guess I'd rather bear that burden than brush my teeth with shi... sorry, I probably should terminate that sentence before I get carried away.
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 accommodations directly, or perhaps via some kind of auction. Acceptance to such a school will be the “basic economy” of attendance. If you want to pick your seat, you can pay to upgrade.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I went to grad school in CS after a few years of work and when I taught I centered the classes around projects. This was more difficult in lower division classes but very effective in upper. But it is more work on the person running the class.
I don't think there's a clear solution that can be applied to all fields or all classes, but I do think it is important people rethink how to do things.
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.
For example, get 90% on a test, that's applauded and earns a distinction. In a job context, 90% gets you fired. I don't want a worker who produces "90% well soldered boards". I don't want software that runs on "90% of our customers computers". Or a bug in every 10 lines of released code.
A test puts an arbitrary time limit on a task. In the real world time is seldom the goal. Correctness is more important. (Well, the mechanic was going to put all the wheel nuts on, but he ran out of time.)
College tests are largely a test of memory, not knowledge or understanding. "List the 7 layers of OSI in order." In the real world you can just Google it. Testing understanding is much harder to mark though, Testing memory is easy to set, easy to mark.
Some courses are moving away from timed tests, and more towards assignments through the year. That's a better measure (but alas also easier to cheat. )
Shockingly I got full credit, although the professor probably picked a bigger prime for her next class.
I just assumed a bit of water in advance would prevent toothpaste from directly/easily adhering to the bristles, keeping more of it "in useful circulation" as it were.
> kinda gross
A few months back I needed some hydrogen peroxide, but the available bottle was more than I was likely to use before it degraded into H20... So, naturally, I started messing around looking for other applications. (It worked great on certain oily gunks that resist isopropyl.)
One weird outcome from that is I've been putting a drop on the bristles of my toothbrush, although it's more of an idle experiment to see if the foaming action dislodges visible crud (i.e. toothpaste near the base) in-between uses, as opposed to a disinfection right before use.
None of these things measure "not an asshole". They measure results. The incentives from there are obvious.
The business owners who treats employees, customers, vendor, everyone like shit in his quest to produce the most widgets, juice every stat, is the one who gets the attention from investors and the one left alone by the government.
Why is that gated like that?
Top 0.01%, +9.1%
Top 0.1%, +13.9%
Top 1%, +15.2%
Top 10%, +6.1%
Middle 40%, -6%
Bottom 50%, -0.1%
This supports exactly GP's two statements:
> we are concentrating all the wealth and power into the hands of a few.
Correct, their slice of the pie is growing, the bottom 90%'s is shrinking
> This leaves the top 1% getting richer every year and the bottom 99% fighting over a smaller piece of the pie every year.
Also correct, the biggest growth of share being in the top 1% segment.
So yeah, I'll take nepo babies and racism over this any day;
I'm also surprised at how common it is for people to openly discuss how irrelevant leetcode is to the actual work on the job but how it is still the status quo. On one hand we like to claim that an academic education is not beneficial but in the other hand use it as the main testing method.
I think why I'm most surprised is we, more than most other jobs, have a publicly visible "proof of competence." Most of us have git repos that are publicly available! I can totally understand that this isn't universal, but in very few industries is there such a publicly visible record of work. Who else has that? Artists? I'm not sure why this isn't more heavily weighted than these weird code tests that we've developed a secondary market to help people optimize for. It feels like a huge waste of money and time.
For real mental disabilities, extra time is actually necessary because a person's brain isn't able to work at the same rate as a healthy person under that situation.
I'm bipolar and have personal experience with this. My brain can lock up on me and I'll need five minutes or so to get it back. Depressive episodes can also affect my memory retrieval. Things come to me slower than they usually do.
I also can't keep track of time the way a healthy person does. I don't actually know how much time each problem takes, and sometimes I don't know how much time is left because can't remember when the test started. I can't read analog clocks; it takes me 10~20 seconds to read them. (1)
Extra time isn't giving me any advantage, it just gives me a chance.
1: I'm not exaggerating here. I've have dyslexia when it comes to numbers.
Here's what I need to do to figure out how much time is left:
- Dig through my brain to find what time it's started. This could remember something was being heard, something I saw, or recalling everything I know about the class.
- Hold onto that number and hope I don't flip the hour and minutes.
- Find a clock anywhere in the classroom and try to remember if it's accurate or not. While I'm doing this I also have to continuously tell the start time to myself.
- Find out the position of the hour hand.
- Tell myself the start time.
- Look at the dial, figure out the hour and try to hold on to it.
- Tell myself the start time.
- Tell myself the hour number.
- Tell myself the start time.
- Find out the position of the minute hand.
- Tell myself the start time.
- Hour forgotten, restart from the hour hand.
- Hour remembered, start time forgotten, restart from the top.
- Both remembered.
- Look at the dial, figure out minute and try to hold to it.
- Hour and start time need to be remembered.
- Combined hour and minute from analog clock.
- Figure out what order I should subtract them in.
- Remember everything
- Two math operations.
Now that I have the time and I don't remember what I needed it for.
- Realize I'm taking a test and try to estimate how much more time I need to complete it.
I could probably use a stopwatch or countdown, but that causes extreme anxiety as I watch the numbers change.
I don't have this kind of problem at my job because I'm not taking arbitrarily-timed tests that determine my worth to society. They don't, but that's what my brain tells me no matter how many times I try to correct it.
> Correct, their slice of the pie is growing, the bottom 90%'s is shrinking
Not sure about "power" there. In my experience you get power by having a lot of free time and dedication to something else other people don't care about… which yes includes billionaires obviously, but most of the people meeting that description are just middle class retirees, so they're outnumbered.
> > This leaves the top 1% getting richer every year and the bottom 99% fighting over a smaller piece of the pie every year.
> Also correct, the biggest growth of share being in the top 1% segment.
It does not show it "every year", there are long periods of stagnation and some reversals. I would say it shows that recessions are bad and we should avoid having them.
nb another more innocuous explanation is: there's no reason to have a lot of wealth. To win at this game you need to hoard wealth, but most people are intentionally not even trying that. For instance, you could have a high income but spend it all on experiences or donate it all to charity.
I really find these "in 2025" takes tiresome. There is no golden age, only your own personal nostalgia masquerading as analysis.
Let's take Alice and Bob, who are both in the same class.
Alice has clinical depression, but on this particular Tuesday, she is feeling ok. She knows the material well and works through the test answering all the questions. She is allowed 30 minutes of extra time, which is helpful as it allows her to work carefully and checking her work.
Bob doesn't have a disability, but he was just dumped by his long term girlfriend yesterday and as a result barely slept last night. Because of his acute depression (a natural emotion that happens to all people sometimes), Bob has trouble focusing during the exam and his mind regularly drifts to ruminate on his personal issues. He knows the material well, but just can't stay on the task at hand. He runs at out of time before even attempting all the problems.
Now, I can imagine two situations.
1. For this particular exam, there really isn't a need to evaluate whether the students can quickly recall and apply the material. In this situation, what reason is there to not also give Bob an extra 30 minutes, same as Alice?
2. For whatever reason, part of the evaluation criteria for this exam is that the test taker is able to quickly recall and apply the material. To achieve a high score, being able to recall all the material is insufficient, it must be done quickly. In this case, basically Alice and Bob took different tests that measured different things.
Put another way, if my brain works at a slower rate than the genius in my class, is it then unfair if my grades don't match theirs?
In general these seem like reasonable differences to consider when hiring someone for a job.
And, yes, definitely water first. It's sitting out there exposed, rinse it off!
Isn't speed and fluency part of skill and mastery of the material?
> Just think about it - when was the last time you had a final exam where literally every person handed in the exam at the last moment. When i was in school, the vast majority of people handed in their exam before the time limit.
I think almost all of my high school exams and at least half of my college finals had >90% of students remaining in the exam hall when the proctor called time.
I've had similar experiences with auto repair shops. Recently I got a BS estimate for an alternator replacement, and a BS explanation. Fortunately, I had done my homework beforehand and knew everything about how to replace the alternator on my particular car, and the service rep knew he was outmaneuvered and gave me a fair price.
Women believe they are targeted by auto mechanics, but they target men as much as they can, too.
A lot of things start like this. You need someone with an aggressive backbone to enforce things - which these institutions won't have.
Ya know, the funny thing about students - if you presume they are honest, they tend to be honest. The students loved it, I loved it. If anyone cheated, the students would turn him in. Nobody ever bragged about cheating, 'cuz they would have been ostracized.
Besides, I actually wanted to learn the stuff.
Maybe your theory is that if you weren't alive in the past to see "an asshole" for yourself, then the prudent conclusion is a sort skepticism about their very existence.
I wonder how you envision the past then... a vacant landscape? Perhaps you actually believe human nature has radically changed just in the past few decades? The odd thing is I think an actual analysis might contradict your claim, that is if the measurement is simply who is "an asshole". Perhaps we would find more surveillance actually reduces "asshole" behavior generally. Like how confrontational people often change their behavior when confronted by a camera, .etc
A similar exam problem in AMA95 was to derive the hyperbolic transforms. The trick there was to know how the Fourier transforms (based on sine/cosine) were derived, and just substitute in sinh/cosh.
If you were a formula plugger or just memorized facts, you'd be dead in the water.
The ASR-33 teletype lasted another year.
I ceased knowing everything about my computer in the late 80s.
We might as well make races longer for athletes with longer legs. It’s unfair to the ones with shorter legs to have to move them more often.
I'm just saying if you are going to let some kids stay longer, let everyone stay longer. And you seem to agree on that point.
Either have a time limit for everyone or no one.
One of the niche magic ingredients to look for is TSP. Alongside bleach (consult proper sources for actual ratios) the combination becomes more powerful against mildews.
Perhaps this comes down to definitions, but i would say that in general, no, speed is not part of mastering material in intellectual pursuits.
Sometimes it might be correlated though. Other times it might be negatively correlated, e.g. someone who memorized everything but doesn't understand the principles will have high speed and low mastery.
Maybe the difference isn’t morality but accepted norms? Or maybe it’s that single room accommodation is possible now and it wasn’t then?
FWIW, just to be clear, I don’t think “manipulating, exploiting or scamming” are good things to do!
Fortunately for them, that's often the case. I've seen at least a couple internet arguments with LLM-generated "sources" that didn't actually exist.
Normies have since invaded and finding someone to geek out with has become hard. (No one wants to discuss the finer points of CPU architectures anymore!)
there is absolutely nothing wrong with getting parking passes, transportation and assistive technology if you are eligible for it and there is no indication fraud here is involved. So, apologies, but your comments here are totally irrelevant to the topic at hand. The article is very much making it sound like people are getting accommodations to get better grades, not to get better parking. If it was simply about better parking, there would not be a story.
Alas, we now depend on "lockdown browser mode" for reliably taking tests where you can type, and still there's no support (AFAIK) for "lockdown vim in browser" for coding tests.
level 2 of the ADHD cheating iceberg is having medically approved methamphetamines to infinistudy before exams e.g. ritalin
Trouble is, getting teenagers to accept and live by that isn't something that will pan out. Societies have been trying for millenia.
If your system built for teenagers relies on the social contract in this way, it's a bad system. People who are over a half decade from a fully developed brain aren't going to grasp this.
Hello, I also have multiple personality order aka dissociative identity disorder, where by multiple people live in the same body
Hello I'm a tiny babby
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?"
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.
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.
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"
If you treat students like children, it's not surprising if they try to game the system
You'd pay online and quickly receive a PESEL (local equivalent of an SSN) + a 4-digit prescription code, which is all that is needed to redeem a prescription there.
Nah, the reality is that people have always been greedy and selfish, gaming the system where they can.
Edit: Elvance apparently has Amphetamin in it as well and I‘ve seen it in the wild here too.
Your additional insights are interesting and believable, however.
exactly. This isn't a new problem. But what has been new is the recent growth in funding to "help" those who are deemed helpless - at someone else's cost (it could be taxpayers, it could be, in this case, other fee paying students).
The problem isn't the grift - it's the lack of any real oversight, and the ease with which such help is given lately (i would call it overly-progressive, but that might trigger some people). It is what makes grift possible.
I think if you look at the 2012 Harvard cheating scandal, it's clear that this isn't true. There, the professor presumed honest students, hundreds cheated, and no student reported.
Shame has practically been thrown out the window in certain places and we can see the effects of that - people scamming each other, lying in the streets, etc. Guilt is also being eroded across the west, leading to things like rampant criminality and punishments that are less than a slap on the wrist.
Fundamentally these emotions are designed to keep us in check with the rest of the group - does this negatively affect some: yes. But at the benefit of creating high trust societies. Every time I encounter this topic I can't help but think: Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
That's a strawman. I'm pretty darn sure they're not claiming it never happened in the past. Only that it is becoming significantly more widespread than it used to be.
I think you're going to have an incredibly hard time making a compelling case that no such trend exists, given the statistics (even on this particular issue in the article, never mind other issues) would very likely strongly suggest the opposite.
It's that much harder to change the rules of standardized testing for all students, for complex and possibly dubious reasons, than it is to make an exception for small number of clearly disadvantaged students. One is inviting nation-wide political discussion on the merits and fairness and consequences of the changes, the other is an isolated act of charity with (initially) no impact on the larger educational system.
Obviously it has? For one thing, we have billions more people on the planet. For another, we have far more constrained resources -- from the environment to education to everything else -- even for a constant number of people, never mind for the ever-increasing population size. (And there are more factors, but these are more than sufficient to get the point across.) These make competition more intense... in every aspect of life, for everyone. And it's only natural that more cutthroat competition results in more people breaking the norms and rules.
It would be shocking if this didn't happen. If there's a question at all, it's really around is when this occurs -- not if it does.
You’re talking about a lottery, which randomly distributes them - which is only fairer in the sense it’s unpredictable, not that anyone that actually needs it would get what they need.
It’s typical gaming of the system, and shortly it’s going to have to switch to punishing those gaming it or it will spiral even more out of control.
The ‘winner’ is he who scams the hardest without getting consequences.
Also it would be fun if you had to pick a star card every semester for one off mechanics like:
“red letter day: papers submitted in tuesdays must use red pen and will be graded in black ink”;
“balogna bingo: all sandwich labels through April will include a random number — match four numbers with another student and your next lunch is free!”; or
“vocabulary dairy: free froyo every week for the students in the 90th percentile for how many times they use the words important, therefore, or however in their papers, but you have to agree to buy a Manual of Style (and provide proof of purchase at the froyo counter)”.
*Ironically one is called RA https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/12/ra
I think if you capitalise the P it's fine. It's not actual progress, but the Progressive movement has pushed it. Because that philosophy has a naive view of people, and assumes the best. So their policies and spending allow tests with 100% sensitivity and 0% specificity.
That would mean the university hiring doctors, or at least paying a doctor to do the test.
We look at the range of lengths that is typical for legs. And all these get to compete under typical conditions.
Now let's say someone has a leg length that is fairly outside of the typical range. Let's say someone has a leg length of zero. We let these athletes compete with each other as well with different conditions, but we don't really compare the results from the typical to the atypical group.
One Problem is, that we first have to clearly define the construct that we want to measure with the test. That is not often clear and often underdefined. When designing a test, we also need to be clear about what external influences contribute to noise / error and which are created by the actual measurement. There never is a test that does not have a margin of error.
A simple / simplified example: When we measure IQ, we want to determine cognitive processing speed. So we need to have fixed time for the test. But people also may read the questions faster or slower. This is just a typical range, so when you look at actual IQ tests, they will not give a score (just the most likely score) but also a margin of error, and test theorists will be very unhappy if you don't take this margin of error seriously. Now take someone who is legally blind. That person will be far out of the margin of error of others. The margins of errors account for typical inter-personal and intra-personal (bad day, girlfriend broke up) etc occurrences. But this doesn't work here. So we try to fix this, and account for the new source of error differently, e.g. by giving more time.
So it highly depends on what you want to measure. If you are doing a test in CS, do you want to measure how well the student understood the material and how fast they can apply it? Or do you want to measure how fast the student could do an actual real-live coding task? Depending on what your answer is, you need a very different measurement strategy and you need to handle sources of error differently.
When looking at grades people usually account for these margins of errors intuitively. We don't just rely on grades when hiring, but also conduct interviews etc so we can get a clearer picture.
If you just want to measure speed, we should clock the time the student gets up, until they get to the room where the test is, get's out his pen etc. So students get the same time to do all this.
We are now measuring the speed at which the student is able to do the test material including all the preparatory steps. Students who live further away or have slower cars will get worse grade, but we are just measuring speed, aren't we?
That is a deliberately stupid example, but it shows that is important to ask "speed of what?". When doing a physics exam, what do we want to include in our measurement? The time it takes the person to read an write? Or just the raw speed at which physics knowledge can be applied? What is error and what is measurement?
You can see it as measuring based on different criteria. Or you can see it as trying to get rid of sources of errors that may be vastly different for different students.
It would be great if we could reduce the sources of errors down to zero for everyone. But unfortunately humans are very stochastic in nature, so we cannot do this. But then there has to be an acceptable source of measurement error (typical distribution) and an unacceptable source of measurement error (atypical distribution) and to actually measure based on the same criteria, you need to measure differently based on what you believe the error to be.
A lot of people do recreational drugs while at college and go on just fine. George W. Bush, for example, is alleged to have taken cocaine.
A few years later, we've got a "walk-in clinic" a neighborhood over which advertises how easy/fast it is to get cannabis cards specifically; By this time there is no approval wait.
A few years later, recreational is legal.
This is a good point. I suspect that even without increased awareness around ADHD or autism, we'd still be seeing an increase in diagnoses because of the increased intensity of modern stuff
He was one of those people who are able to contain their hedonism and self-abuse to their frat-boy era. Now, he’s a grey-ish beard tech dude with an awesome wife and family.
Are you talking about the generation of doctors writing the disability assessments?
Most young people are still fine. Neither of my kids ever claimed to be disabled.
As far as I understand, it was precisely because of situations like the one described in the article that people voted for him.
In practice, you don't need to be honest and incorruptible to win an election. You just need to be more honest and incorruptible than your opponent.
>In 1990 7.4% of single young adults were living with a roommate, increasing to 8.1% in 2000. From 2010 through 2022 the share was stable, reaching 8.7% in 2022.
>From 1990 through 2016 the share of single young adults living alone remained relatively stable, ranging from 6.0% to 6.8%. However, the share increased to 8.2% in 2022.
Although I think this does include current students.
https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/FP...
Snorting will also shoot your tolerance through the roof, so taking it orally will no longer be as effective. Definitely not a road I recommend going down
Typical cocaine use also does not result in meaningful harm.
The financial industry chugs along just fine despite approximately everybody using these drugs.
I’ve used cocaine regularly at social events since I was a teenager. The vast majority of people I know, whether they’re 25 or 65, will not say no when offered. In my whole life I’ve known two people from my circles to have developed an actual coke problem, and I know a lot of people.
At this point coke is just the cigarettes of the upper classes, but likely less harmful.
An excellent way to git gud at something is to do timed practice again and again. Aim for 100% correct answers AND for fast answers. Answers that took to long should be identified and practiced again (and maybe some of the theory should be re-read or read from another textbook).
Don't settle for 100% correct during practice.
Can he do that well?
Is he likely to continue to be able to do that as he progresses to the stuff that is actually hard?
(My guess is that the answers are yes (so far), no, and definitely not.)
Take slow processing is a really good symptom of something that needs more practice time.
/s
I don't think you can charge more for accommodations for the disabled.
What disability accomodations do you think the parents are receiving?
If that takes away a limited resource from someone else (e.g. dorm space) or makes it worse for others (e.g. people don't want animals in a dorm), then yes. Absolutely.
Now people with actual disabilities have a huge uphill battle because even mentioning an accomodation might be requested puts you at the back of the line.
Sue you say? LOL. Hope you have five figures ready to throw away for a retainer just to gamble that anybody still cares.
And basically any big name in the financial industry has almost certainly used loads of cocaine. They’re mostly not suffering any horrible consequences.
But of course there’s a world of difference between cocaine use and addiction. An addict might start their day with a line, every day, but that’s far from typical use.
And I recall a sci-fi short story long ago, technological civilization on a single continent with a permanently clouded sky. They had not figured out they were living on a sphere, they were having trouble with train tracks mysteriously being the wrong distance and train passengers feeling light on the high speed trains. I didn't check the guy's math but it sure seemed right when the answers looked exactly like Einstein's equations even though the units were very different. (Limiting velocity = orbital velocity, the discontinuity being weightlessness.)
> Not to mention that if you have a "disability" that is treatable with medication, should you still be accommodated?
I know people with incredibly severe ADHD, who are on medication, but in their case the medication is only able to make them reasonably functional. They still have difficult day-to-day issues.
But yeah, in general I'd say if you have something that is entirely fixable with medication, you don't need an accommodation.
The problem is that the ADA is worded such that businesses and organizations can't dig into these sorts of details, so they err on the side of accommodating in order to avoid lawsuits.
That's not mentioned in the article. Is this your personal speculation or do you have something to support that claim? The article seems to make it clear that it is the students themselves getting these accommodations, so your claim is directly contradicting the article we're commenting on.
> why are we acting like stanford students are unaccountable teenagers
Well they're definitionally teenagers, and if you know of a way to make teenagers act en masse accountable to society's values, that would be a novel development in social human history going back to Ancient Greece. So barring that, we should treat the teenagers whose brains have not yet developed enough to grasp society-wide consequences for personal actions as such.
At my (secular) university, we did have a few single-sex dorms (optional for people who were uncomfortable with a mixed-sex dorm), but all others were co-ed, though some were separated into all-male and all-female hallways where they'd share a single-sex bathroom.
IIRC even the female-only dorms had no rules about overnight stays (though males had to be escorted around the building by their female host). A university not allowing people to stay overnight reeks of puritanical values.
Regardless, this isn't Victorian England. Men and women mix and live in shared spaces. There are plenty of adult living spaces in the world where people have their own apartment/room, but share bathroom space. That's also common in lower end hotels/hostels for travelers. Requiring that college students live in gender-separated living situations is a bad way to prepare them for the real world.
That seems incredibly unlikely today, and doesn't at all match with my experience. Obviously I am not qualified to diagnose someone with autism, but the idea that more than 50% of my colleagues, past and present, are on the spectrum... that just doesn't pass the smell test.
One reason it did work is the students liked being trusted, and they did not like anyone that would threaten the system, and would turn them in.
BTW, that was 50 years ago. I have no information on how the honor system is fairing today.
I can't believe I've never thought of this, but now I am entirely grossed out and will start rinsing my toothbrush before using it.
(I guess that means you gave me ADHD! It's infectious via text!)
"Brain damage" isn't a binary yes-or-no thing that happens to you.
It's not even clear that regular as-prescribed usage of amphetamine is without some harm potential. With regular doses and route of administration it's obviously limited or negligible, but someone insufflating (snorting) it routinely is exposing their brains to much higher concentrations and much faster onset.
Note that dopamine itself is toxic when metabolized normally, but your body is equipped to mostly handle that. Using drugs that disrupt dopamine flows in high doses can overwhelm the systems designed to keep dopamine metabolism from doing damage.
> Typical cocaine use also does not result in meaningful harm.
The works "typical" and "meaningful" are doing a lot of work here. One of my friend groups has a lot of ER nurses. They see a non-trivial number of people coming to the hospital from casual cocaine use. These cases are generally waved away as other conditions by drug users (e.g. heart attacks, etc) and therefore they don't "count" in some people's minds. Yet it's a common finding for them on blood workups for people, including young people, arriving with cardiovascular problems.
> The vast majority of people I know, whether they’re 25 or 65, will not say no when offered.
Significant drug users often don't realize how much of a bubble they're in. Also, the goalposts for having a drug problem tend to be moved around a lot when everyone you know is using drugs regularly. Typically, being unable to say no when offered a drug is a sign of having a problem.
When a pill is swallowed it is gradually released into the bloodstream. Some drugs are also partially degraded by the digestive system, meaning you don't get 100% into the bloodstream. For some drugs, as much as 90% or more can be destroyed in the stomach, but this is accounted for in the dosing. Your stomach contents also go through your liver, which does first-pass metabolism depending on the drug and can reduce overall concentrations.
When someone snorts a drug, it bypasses all of that. It has easy access to the brain. It spikes the concentration the brain sees far in excess of what you would get from taking the drug orally.
This spike is where the damage is amplified. A sudden spike to very high values can overwhelm the brain's protection systems, for example.
Dopamine degradation produces neurotoxic metabolites. The brain is normally decent at cleaning these up, but when you consume drugs that spill that dopamine out at excess rates and disrupt its storage in vesicles then you can also overwhelm the brain's ability to clean up safely.
The sudden spike also causes rapid downregulation of the affected receptors, leading to deeper withdrawal effects that can last for a long time.
The sudden spike is also more euphoric. Combine that with the deeper withdrawal and it's why taking a pill through the nose is far more addictive than taking it orally.
So you need to have respect for your dorm mate, and your suite mates. And you know that, unfortunately, while "be respectful and adult" should be the expectation, there's always someone that ruins that, and the next thing the college has to set rules and say "this is why you can't have nice things".
And I expect there's a bit of liability minimization on the college's part - I'm not saying I agree, but the college probably has concerns of "it's mid term, and an allegation of inappropriate behavior happens, what do you do?" (and I think there's multiple issues with that, like it's not like that can't happen in same sex dorms, but I'm just trying to think about why the college might see it that way).
I get it - and at my stepdaughter's school there are co-ed dorms of different styles. But what they don't offer, and in this case is what the students hoped to achieve was "give us our own dorm with one bed", effectively.
The issue then also comes down to "well, college relationships aren't always the most durable things" - what happens when they break up? Who has to move out? It's not one person's space. Now the college is also on the hook for ensuring that there's sufficient vacancy (wasted) to handle these situations in other dorms.
Essentially it's one night a week. So, if both students, effectively two nights a week.
I don't disagree. I think it would be disrespectful to your dorm mate if your partner was just living in that space (which is already small for two, let alone three) most of the time. And you have to imagine that's at least part of the reason why such things are rules now, not suggestions.
My son runs into the phony accommodation game in middle school. The latest BS is to get a dyslexia diagnosis, which lets you have more time and take a 90 minute break (where they look up the answers). 9 kids discovered that they have this condition in 8th grade. Performance impacts eligibility for placement in some programs in high school.
If the kids didn’t know it, I wouldn’t have an issue with it. But they do, and abusing accommodations and gamification of zero integrity behavior undermines society in a small way.
I take Adderall and literally fall asleep because it lets my brain shut down. It _decreases_ my anxiety.
I don't get high or hyper off of it, it literally just lets me function enough to do my laundry. It's honestly like wearing glasses.
But in the same bedroom? Because outside the context of a college dorm, I don't think I've really come across "roommate" as referring to sharing a bedroom, and sharing a 2BR apartment is a significantly different situation.
The biggest danger to cocaine? Using cocaine to stave off the over-dose effects of other longer-lasting drugs, and then running out of cocaine before you run out of the other drugs and then dieing from alcohol poisoning or opiate over-dose. Cops and politicians will pretend cocaine killed those people, but anyone who knows jack shit about drugs or gets to see the actual toxicology report knows better.
Shitty boss/job? Having extra money lets you tell them to fuck themselves and move to another job at any time. If you don't have extra money, well you are not going to be able to tell your shitty boss to shove it unless you want to risk becoming homeless and destitute. Legal trouble? Well money is the solution, which is why poor people are so often screwed over by legal trouble because they can't lawyer their way out. Etc etc
Maybe its fine for many extroverts, but forcing an introvert into a room with others is a great way to drive many people absolutely mental.
Similarly, I don’t think you could reasonably suggest that someone who has a couple of glasses of wine during such events has a drinking problem.
> Significant drug users often don't realize how much of a bubble they're in. Also, the goalposts for having a drug problem tend to be moved around a lot when everyone you know is using drugs regularly. Typically, being unable to say no when offered a drug is a sign of having a problem
Personally, I’d consider someone who uses cocaine on a daily basis to have a problem. I’d also like to suggest that it’s pretty hard to have a cocaine problem and not use cocaine on a daily basis.
OTOH, someone who infrequently shoots up cocaine probably isn’t addicted but would be engaging in some seriously risky behaviour unless they’re able to very precisely measure their dosage. I’ve never heard of anyone doing that though, it’s certainly not a common activity among the upper socioeconomic classes.
> The works "typical" and "meaningful" are doing a lot of work here. One of my friend groups has a lot of ER nurses. They see a non-trivial number of people coming to the hospital from casual cocaine use. These cases are generally waved away as other conditions by drug users (e.g. heart attacks, etc) and therefore they don't "count" in some people's minds. Yet it's a common finding for them on blood workups for people, including young people, arriving with cardiovascular problems
To my knowledge there exists no evidence that anything less than massive cocaine use could result in new cardiovascular issues. Of course it may trigger an existing condition, but someone who has a heart attack during normal casual use of cocaine would probably be prone to have one during exercise also. The stress on the heart from cocaine usage is not particularly different from fairly normal day-to-day activities of people who do not use cocaine.
Uh yeah. Moral judgments are about personal beliefs