Great to hear some things never change. Now it's finally Gen Z destroying the world and no longer millennials.
Sorry if my comment went over your head.
The comment was about the style of articles that were in vogue in the mid 10's.
A good sample here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewjosuweit/2017/10/22/5-ind...
If I need to condense it further the connection I see is that weird people feel a need to see new market trends and uses of the system as coordinated efforts of malice.
Instead it's probably just that young people aren't thriving. Better information lets people know more about systems of assistance.
Some defective humans really dislike any assistance programs and invent phantoms and weird statistics. Tale as old as time
But sure, it’s the zoomers. Wonder where they picked up that grifting is the new hot thing and laws are only for idiots. Must’ve been the deep state kindergarten teachers and communist daycares.
To be very clear, the only real evidence anybody has provided is that way more students at Stanford have registered disabilities than students at community colleges. And individual students have tweeted.
These stories want you to draw the conclusion that there are huge numbers of students who are faking disabilities and then getting access to accommodations that give them an unfair advantage in coursework, setting them up for an unfair advantage in the job market. But nobody has been able to provide evidence of these things. Are these students really faking disabilities? Or are students with means far more likely to have access to doctors who can identify these disabilities? Do the students with disabilities actually get accommodations that make courses easier for them in an unfair way? Do these improved grades give students a meaningful leg up in the job market? Nobody is pointing to evidence here. They just let you conclude that this is happening.
My spouse is a professor. There are oodles of students who have disabilities who don't receive any accommodations because their course is already set up to support these students well. This idea of structuring evaluations such that everybody is getting access to the things that a student with ADHD or whatever might get is increasingly common in universities.
> But nobody has been able to provide evidence of these things.
Universities are able to provide such evidence, and are the only ones who can.
> that everybody is getting access
There is no evidence that this is actuality, or ever will be.
The "little or no evidence" line to defeat premises is cheap.
It took me 2 applications, a lawyer, and 9 years (of 11 years living unhoused) to prove disability that has to be reviewed every 2 years because somehow, magically, I will suddenly not become "disabled" anymore with permanent conditions.
The "welfare queen" myth is racist and false. There might be some people who try to cheat, but it's incredibly laborious and not very profitable to do so, and the penalties are draconian.
It's not a small problem in Canada. Funny was this patient who got rear ended like 8 times in a few years and needed time off and massage treatment every time.
Shameless grifters are everywhere my dude. This victimhood grifiting in the article above has been obvious for over a decade. If you listened to those anecdotes and vibes you would have known this well in advanced.
Anecdotal stuff / vibes are actually really useful. The "scientific" stuff isn't as formal as you might imagine. Going to conferences is a good way to learn that the vibes are what you are going to learn.
You'd think science is supposed to be this amazing rigorous way to do things. But the way you collect the data and the way you do the analysis and the reports you choose to write is anything but. Ultimately because, well, grifters are everywhere.
Do you personally know anyone who does this?
The fish rots from the head.
In India it's purely score based. Top on the JIT (although I guess they have special things for scheduled castes or something), you get in. In Sweden the same. Top 1% on the högskoleprov and there's nothing you can't get in to. Maybe KTH has its own, more advanced maths test for entry, and I think you need to pass an interview for medicine at KI, but aside from that nothing you can't get into. At ETH they see whether you can pass a first year of courses.
But in the US it's a bunch of weirdness, and it's from Idpol. I don't know if you could avoid it-- India obviously doesn't want to avoid it completely, but another idea is to not have the arbitrary eliteness be a thing. I used to believe in something like it, believing that only certain Swedish universities were okay (and that's probably still true for education), and then a bunch of Germans who wanted to be professors got jobs at the ones I thought were shitty and started doing good research and suddenly you ended up with places like Örebro, which I had regarded as 'what even is this' producing real science. I think the Germans are right and that a distributed less status-based university system is sensible.
Furthermore in the current political environment, such analysis-free rants aren't just chum that makes like-minded rambling uncles need more blood pressure meds, but rather can end up being fuel for someone-must-do-something-type destructionist rallying cries that only serve to facilitate more grift by the performative strongman administration - compounding the very problem!
Constructively, the difficulty is that reforming institutions and restoring societal trust is very hard. Here we've got at least four things that need to be done simultaneously -
1. restoring belief that the system will significantly punish you if you lie/exaggerate about having a disability
2. restoring trust in the system such that people, both internal and external to the institution, aren't inclined to panic over "xx% of students claiming disability"
3. reforming the general system for people without disabilities, eg testing methodologies and cramped housing accommodations
4. generally reforming what counts as a disability that makes sense to even try and mitigate
Fail at doing any one of these and we've still got similar pressure to cheat, so the problem will only ever retreat a bit rather than having formed self-reinforcing cultural values.
(I'm addressing the problem referenced by the article, not the adjacent problem you've described)
If you want to see my constructive thoughts on the subject at hand, in spite of the useless article as a starting point, you can check out my other follow up comments.
Once upon a time (ie 2 years ago) the President following the law, living up to both implicit and explicit agreements made with foreign nations, not wanting to plaster their own name onto everything, not lying about the citizens of the country, etc would be considered a good thing.
Today, doing the opposite is considered praiseworthy because “at least he’s doing something”.
This is exactly the “anything goes” mentality the author is critiquing.
Have you really never heard the phrase "it's much easier to tear things down than build them up"? Is the manifest obviousness of that phrase really not obvious to you?
Yes you too can
1. Talk about blowing up buildings
2. Blow up buildings
So he's not the first of anything in any length of time because this is what assholes all around the world do every day.
The problem is that the things he’s doing are using his office to become an actual billionaire and tearing down protections against abuse and fraud. You don’t fight “institutional rot” by enshrining the principle that loyalty trumps following the law or that policy outcomes can be purchased on the blockchain. Lying about the law and actions by his predecessors similar is building, not lowering, institutional rot by encouraging the idea that cheating is okay as long as you win (c.f. continued lying about election integrity or awarding government funds and jobs based on political affiliation).
I'd say that institutional rot would be a much better framework for analyzing the situation of all these disabilities being claimed, but that is not where this article goes! Rather the only thing it seemingly offers is that we're just supposed to feel bad and aim to be more like the single person in the one example given, even as our societal leaders crassly do the exact opposite.
(As far as Trump "doing things" - yes, he's doing a lot of grift at the expense of our country. That's kind of the problem, right? Bureaucratic malaise was bad, and this is worse)
But regardless, the same point could have been made about the Republican party in general for decades.
See The Baffler's article titled "The Long Con" for a history. It opens with a now shockingly unshocking list of all the lies Romney told and the prescient claim that this was necessary for Republican voters to like him.
> Mitt Romney is a liar. Of course, in some sense, all politicians, even all human beings, are liars. Romney’s lying went so over-the-top extravagant by this summer, though, that the New York Times editorial board did something probably unprecedented in their polite gray precincts: they used the L-word itself. “Mr. Romney’s entire campaign rests on a foundation of short, utterly false sound bites,” they editorialized. He repeats them “so often that millions of Americans believe them to be the truth.” “It is hard to challenge these lies with a well-reasoned-but- overlong speech,” they concluded; and how. Romney’s lying, in fact, was so richly variegated that it can serve as a sort of grammar of mendacity.
[...]
> All righty, then: both the rank-and-file voters and the governing elites of a major American political party chose as their standardbearer a pathological liar. What does that reveal about them?
-- 2012
Would you say the same about Independent University of Moscow or about or the ETH? At least IUM is obviously better than Harvard. I don't have specifics about Harvard people, but I know that the Chalmers people I know have a higher average level than the Ivy League (none from Harvard) people I know. I have no comparison of the KTH people and the Chalmers people, but in theory the KTH people should be better, because I've never been in a workplace with both the KTH people and the ivy league people, so I can't compare them.
The core thing though, is that people in the US who want to get into these schools have to do hoop jumping. For these Swedish schools hoop jumping makes no sense, because you'll get in if you're academically sound enough, so you can actually focus on academic soundness, so you do.
I think the right solution is strict test-based admissions, like in Sweden, and forbidding schools from admitting other than on test results. In addition to that, making things like getting top government jobs also test based. In Sweden we do this for diplomats. You have to get a university degree, but whether you get in doesn't depend primarily on prestige or interviews, it depends on whether you pass a somewhat difficult test.
In this way you ensure that what university you went to doesn't really matter, and over time what I imagine is a more distributed university system where co-operation with institutions and someone's particular ideas matters more than what institutions he's associated with, and where the extreme prestige of particular schools disappears.
I think it's especially important to eliminate the hoop jumping, so that people can know that, as long as the extreme prestige universities exist, they can get into them if they perform well enough on exams, with nothing being able to interfere with that-- no individual judgement, no subjectivity, no hoop you haven't jumped. Just pure merit, like the Swedish or French system.
> her fellow students were claiming they were disabled to receive accommodations like extra time on tests, excused absences and the best housing on campus
As far as the problem you're talking about, I get what you're describing and agree it sounds appealing. The problem in the US is the university hierarchy is one of the things used to perpetuate class, so the people who are able to change it generally benefit from how it currently is.
There's way, way more than enough evidence to require investigation. Which could then possibly lead to a standard of proof...
If tptb investigated. Which they haven't, despite all the evidence.
... Which is its own kind of proof.
This seems … reasonable? Car crashes are the leading cause of life-altering injuries in North America and back pain is notoriously hard to prove to the point that a hostile audience can’t say they’re overstated. If you look at case studies from the American opioid crisis, a disturbing number of them start with someone getting in a road or workplace accident and not having a full pain management regimen.
You don't even need a study to prove you wrong, it should be common sense that being rear ended has a good chance of causing chronic neck injuries, let alone 8 of them. But I got you numbers anyway:
> NP pain is common after involvement in a motor vehicle collision (MVC) with 86% of injured occupants reporting NP pain.6 In Ontario 17.6% of those exposed to an MVC report a personal injury...
> Neck injury resulting from an MVC is associated with a high rate of chronicity. Prognosis studies indicate 50% of injured people continue to experience NP a year after the collision.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6899867/
> Anecdotal stuff / vibes are actually really useful.
You can just say you've already made up your mind despite not having personal experience, your anecdotes being biased, and having no statistically relevant evidence - and nothing will change your mind.
Don't waste people's time pretending to be genuine and poison the intellectual well by trying to normalize "feelings based reality".
> When you are know a doctor and overhear conversations with some ranting doctor friends you learn.
What a joke. If a retail worker serves 300 people in a day and then comes home and complains about some guy who yelled at them, it doesn't mean that there's an epidemic of people yelling. That person is 0.3% of interactions but will make up 100% of the complaints because they stood out
You don't even seen to have the gall of asking the doctors youry eavesdropping on if they concur, because surely that would have been your evidence instead.
>> Anecdotal stuff / vibes are actually really useful.
> You can just say you've already made up your mind despite not having personal experience, your anecdotes being biased, and having no statistically relevant evidence - and nothing will change your mind.
I absolutely can and do change my mind, lots of times. I'm not an old fart set in his ways. What I'm saying is that there is an overcorrection towards this "intellectual well" way of thinking. It's not that statistics is useless, it's that someone telling you of an issue based on vibes / personal experience, or from a single sample is useful even if editors would desk reject it.
It's as though people behave as the numbers in papers come from God instead of a study done with limitations by people who have agendas and make mistakes. It can be right, I love good papers, and despite what you might have concluded actually I love rigor, mathematics in particular is amazing, but when you also take the approach of rejecting any story or opinion because a stat said so (often ignoring how that stat may have been collected or data analysed), this is where problems happen.
The people punching down and gatekeeping are either completely ignorant or parroting racist and classist tropes they heard from Fox News denying the existence of inaccessibly and hurdles to reaching the scant assistance available in the US to people who desperately need it.
This is a meaningless assimilation fallacy.
The US system is completely different from the Canadian one. You have zero knowledge of how things work here.
He is after all a rapist, thief, liar, conman, bully, grifter, authoritarian, gangster, racist, sexist narcissist who may very well end the American empire and democracy, and with your help it seems.
Which seems on topic for an article about America becoming a nation of grifters.
But at least he's doing things!