World Health Organization: 16%

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/disability-...

UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs: 15%

https://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/resources/f...

CDC: 25% of Americans

https://www.cdc.gov/disability-and-health/articles-documents...

ROD Group: 22%

https://www.rod-group.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/The-Glo...

Plus all that happens before you get an accommodation, which is a wholly separate process.

Which is an unreasonable claim.

I have a disability that impairs many aspects of my life. I was still capable of getting through college and am successful in my career. Having a disability does not mean you can't do academics.

15-20% of the world is estimated to have a disability. So Stanford population is high, but approximately double the average of a random global population sample.

Now, think about the selection pressures Stanford applies. Stanford selects students who are fighting for top academic honors. Those students are dealing with brutal competition, and likely see their future as hanging on their ability to secure one of a small number of slots in the school. Anxiety would be genuinely higher in the student body than, say, students at a mid rate state school.

Stanford wants students with strong test scores, especially those who are strongly capable in mathematics. High spatial awareness, cognitive integration, and working memory can be positive traits in some autistic people and some find strong success in standardized environments and in mathematics.

We're also improving diagnostic tools for autism and ADHD, and recognizing that the tools we used missed a lot of cases in young women, because they present differently than for young men.

Imagine a house party where the guests are selected at random from MIT or Stanford, then imagine you selected guests at random from, say, all Americans. Are you telling me you'd be surprised if the MIT and Stanford crowd had a noticeably different population demographic than the overall American population?

And while some might be doing what you say, others might genuinely have a moral threshold they are unwilling to cross. Who am I to tell someone they don't actually have a genuinely held belief?

* The environmental cost of inference in aggregate and training in specific is non-negligible

* Training is performed (it is assumed) with material that was not consented to be trained upon. Some consider this to be akin to plagiarism or even theft.

* AI displaces labor, weakening the workers across all industries, but especially junior folks. This consolidates power into the hands of the people selling AI.

* The primary companies who are selling AI products have, at times, controversial pasts or leaders.

* Many products are adding AI where it makes little sense, and those systems are performing poorly. Nevertheless, some companies shove short AI everywhere, cheapening products across a range of industries.

* The social impacts of AI, particularly generative media and shopping in places like YouTube, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, etc are not well understood and could contribute to increased radicalization and Balkanization.

* AI is enabling an attention Gish-gallop in places like search engines, where good results are being shoved out by slop.

Hopefully you can read these and understand why someone might have moral concerns, even if you do not. (These are not my opinions, but they are opinions other people hold strongly. Please don't downvote me for trying to provide a neutral answer to this person's question.)

Yes, a toxic version of this exists, but simply refusing to do a thing isn't toxic.

It's difficult for me to accept it's better given all the above.

We had a recall we called to try and schedule several times, and they always said, "we have no appointments available right now, but if you want to pay $400 for a new center console computer part too, we can get you in this week."

Shady.

(FWIW the car itself had so many issues. It didn't seal, so at highway speeds it would cause pressure waves inside, the door handles broke a bunch, the dashboard would regularly crash and need to be rebooted and we'd lose the speedometer, a bunch of fit and finish issues like threads that dangled from panels... and more)

Biggest waste of an opportunity I've encountered.