38% of Stanford Students "Disabled" (I Was One Of Them) Disability-Maxing

Join Simone and Malcolm Collins as they dive into the explosive growth of disability accommodations at elite universities. Drawing from recent articles, personal experiences, and lively online debates, they explore how and why the number of students receiving accommodations has skyrocketed—sometimes for reasons that go far beyond genuine need.

This episode unpacks the incentives driving students, parents, and institutions to game the system, the cultural and ethical implications of widespread accommodations, and the unintended consequences for education and society. From private dorms to extended test times, Simone and Malcolm discuss the real-world impact of these policies, the blurred lines between advantage and necessity, and what it all means for the future of higher education.

Whether you’re a student, educator, parent, or just curious about the changing landscape of academia, this conversation will challenge your assumptions and spark new questions.

If you enjoy thought-provoking discussions on education, culture, and policy, don’t forget to like, subscribe, and share! Below is the episode outline; you’ll find the episode transcript at the very end. :)

The Gist

* Disability accommodation at universities is getting insane, both in scale and nature

* From an Atlantic article on the issue:

* “This year, 38 percent of Stanford undergraduates are registered as having a disability; in the fall quarter, 24 percent of undergraduates were receiving academic or housing accommodations.”

* Though side note, apparently Stanford is so bad because you can use a disability qualification to get a guaranteed single dorm, which is HUGE.

* “One administrator told me that a student at a public college in California had permission to bring their mother to class. This became a problem, because the mom turned out to be an enthusiastic class participant.”

* These out-of-control numbers are mostly coming from people gaming the system, driven by competitive pressures and not actual disabilities

* And Atlantic highlighting this growth in accommodation has sparked some great commentary on X:

* Students shared their experiences:

* Basil wrote: “In my HS AP Chem class there were 11 students and I was the only one without double time, so I had to hand in my test early while everyone else in the class got to continue”

* Calder McHugh shared: “Over a decade ago, at the private NYC high school I attended, in an 18-person math class there was once a quiz that only THREE of us took on time/without accommodations. ADHD/ADD tests were just ordered up (and that’s not to mention the tutors, etc, that were writing everyone’s essays for them). As someone with artist parents who didn’t know how to (and didn’t want to) game the system in this way, I felt constantly disadvantaged in the moment. But years later, I’m so grateful that wasn’t my experience in high school or college because I actually managed to learn something. // This is a great piece and it’s shocking in many ways; it’s also just a broader swath of the American public catching up to what the ultra-elite have been doing for their children for a long time now.”

* For example, as Matthew Zeitlin mused on X: “i wonder how much nihilism/low social trust comes from the sense that everyone is getting one over on you and everyone else”

* On that theme, Armand Domalewsky noted that “one thing I feel like conservatives grok better than liberals is if you create an honor code based rule that gives someone an advantage (“don’t enforce fare collection, most people pay”) eventually even honest people feel compelled to cheat to avoid being cheated”

* Bobby Fijan describes this behavior as: “The upper class version of subway fare jumping // Breaking rules just because you can. And making everyone who follows the rules into chumps.”

* Michael Gibson had a great Zinger: ““To each according to their need” creates a society where people compete to be victims”

* On a different note, Josh Barro points out that: “if you have a condition like ADHD, anxiety, or depression, and it makes it harder for you to complete tests on time, that is something the test should *measure*, not something it should avoid measuring.”

* Molly follows up: “I wonder what happens to these kids upon graduation. No employer is going to give you extra time on a deadline or let you bring your mom to work.”

* Our buddy Razib Khan chimes in: “do you want your lawyer to get more time on their LSAT? do they get more time to bill more hours when they work on your case? absurd”

* Katherine Boyle: “Parents encourage or let their kids opt into disability diagnosis because it seems like there’s little downside: more time on tests, better chances at college admissions, optional performance enhancing drugs, accommodations of all types. I can’t stress this enough: the consequence is your child’s character. Many kids genuinely believe they’re sick or that there’s something wrong with them. You tell a girl she seems anxious, she’ll believe she’s anxious. You tell a boy he has a true disability in the form of ADHD and he starts thinking creativity or day dreaming is a deficiency. You can gaslight people into believing they’re sick, and we have entire systems and institutions encouraging this. We’ve convinced young people it’s fine to be weak and frail, when we should be doing the opposite: convincing them they’re resilient, independent, strong people who can handle any challenge. If there’s one thing I believe as a parent, it’s that you can will your children into greatness. Society will encourage them to do the opposite, but you don’t have to comply.”

* Teacher Neeraja Deshpande confirms this: “Lots of people assuming this is purposeful manipulation, and, yes, there are definitely cases of that (e.g., Varsity Blues), but the reality, from what I’ve seen, first among my peers and then as a teacher, is actually worse: these kids *actually* believe they are disabled! Yes, it’s ridiculous to the rest of us willing to plainly state that the emperor has no clothes, but for these kids (and their parents) the “disability” is very real, even if it is fake, and that learned helplessness—which leads to actual, crippling anxiety—is why discussing this is such a third rail in education.”

But I think there’s more going on than the competitive flywheel effect, the way this contributes to the dissolution of legacy education, and the fact that we’re driving our kids into victim mindsets—there’s fascinating bureaucratic corruption at play and this development has important implications for future job market success, so let’s go further.

The Article that Sparked the Discussion

Accommodation Nation: America’s colleges have an extra-time-on-tests problem.

By Rose Horowitch

The article is all about how academic accommodations, especially extra time on tests, have expanded so rapidly at elite U.S. colleges that they now threaten basic ideas of fairness while still failing many truly disabled and less privileged students.

THE OPENING SOUNDS LIKE THE PREMISE OF A SOUTH PARK EPISODE

“Administering an exam used to be straightforward: All a college professor needed was an open room and a stack of blue books. At many American universities, this is no longer true. Professors now struggle to accommodate the many students with an official disability designation, which may entitle them to extra time, a distraction-free environment, or the use of otherwise-prohibited technology. The University of Michigan has two centers where students with disabilities can take exams, but they frequently fill to capacity, leaving professors scrambling to find more desks and proctors. Juan Collar, a physicist at the University of Chicago, told me that so many students now take their exams in the school’s low-distraction testing outposts that they have become more distracting than the main classrooms.”

Growth of accommodations

Over the past 10–15 years, the share of students registered with disabilities at selective universities has surged, with some schools seeing numbers triple or quintuple. At places like Brown, Harvard, Amherst, and Stanford, large fractions of undergraduates are now registered as disabled and many receive testing or housing accommodations.

* “In 2019, a Wall Street Journal analysis found that one in five Scarsdale High School students was considered disabled and eligible for accommodations on college entrance exams—a rate more than seven times higher than the national average.”

* “At Brown and Harvard, more than 20 percent of undergraduates are registered as disabled. At Amherst, that figure is 34 percent. Not all of those students receive accommodations, but researchers told me that most do.”

* “Forty years ago, students with disabilities could count on few protections in higher education. Federal law prohibited discrimination against disabled students, but in practice schools did little to address their needs. Michael Ashley Stein, a disability-rights expert who teaches at Harvard Law, recalled the challenges of attending law school as a student using a wheelchair in the 1980s. “I sat in the back of the classroom, could not enter certain buildings in a normal way, became the first person on the law review with a disability, and dragged myself up the stairs,” he told me.”

* “The Americans With Disabilities Act, passed in 1990, was meant to make life fairer for people like Stein. The law required public and private institutions to provide reasonable accommodations to individuals with “a physical or mental impairment” that “substantially limits one or more major life activities.””

The Underrated Driver of the Surge: Bureaucratic Bloat

One driver: Bureaucratic bloat and greed

* In 2008, “The government broadened the definition of disability, effectively expanding the number of people the law covered. It also included a list of major life activities that could be disrupted by a disability (“learning, reading, concentrating, thinking,” among others) and clarified that individuals were protected under the ADA even if their impairment didn’t severely restrict their daily life.”

* “In response to the 2008 amendments, the Association on Higher Education and Disability (AHEAD), an organization of disability-services staff, released guidance urging universities to give greater weight to students’ own accounts of how their disability affected them, rather than relying solely on a medical diagnosis. “Requiring extensive medical and scientific evidence perpetuates a deviance model of disability, undervalues the individual’s history and experience with disability and is inappropriate and burdensome under the revised statute and regulations,” AHEAD wrote.”

* BLATANT!! “Most of the disability advocates I spoke with are more troubled by the students who are still not getting the accommodations they need than by the risk of people exploiting the system. They argue that fraud is rare, and stress that some universities maintain stringent documentation requirements. “I would rather open up access to the five kids who need accommodations but can’t afford documentation, and maybe there’s one person who has paid for an evaluation and they really don’t need it,” Emily Tarconish, a special-education teaching-assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told me. “That’s worth it to me.””

* “Tarconish sees the growing number of students receiving accommodations as evidence that the system is working. Ella Callow, the assistant vice chancellor of disability rights at Berkeley, had a similar perspective. “I don’t think of it as a downside, no matter how many students with disabilities show up,” she told me. “Disabled people still are deeply underemployed in this country and too often live in poverty. The key to addressing that is in large part through institutions like Berkeley that make it part of our mission to lift people into security.””

The obvious driver: People strategically getting ahead by asserting that depression or anxiety is a disability:

* “Students at Carnegie Mellon University whose severe anxiety makes concentration difficult might get extra time on tests or permission to record class sessions, Catherine Samuel, the school’s director of disability resources, told me. Students with social-anxiety disorder can get a note so the professor doesn’t call on them without warning.”

* Proof that the growth in disability is exploitative: “No one is more skeptical of the accommodations system than the academics who study it. Robert Weis, a psychology professor at Denison University, pointed me to a Department of Education study that found that middle and high schoolers with disabilities tend to have below-average reading and math skills. These students are half as likely to enroll in a four-year institution as students without disabilities and twice as likely to attend a two-year or community college. If the rise in accommodations were purely a result of more disabled students making it to college, the increase should be more pronounced at less selective institutions than at so called Ivy Plus schools.”

TL:DR: Broader legal definitions under the ADA amendments, looser documentation standards, and changes in diagnostic criteria for conditions like ADHD have made it easier to qualify for accommodations. Rising diagnoses of ADHD, anxiety, and depression, plus universities’ efforts to simplify the process, have further accelerated demand, especially at wealthy, highly selective schools.

Why This Contributes to the Obsolescence of Legacy Education

From the Atlantic article: “Having ADHD or anxiety, for example, might make it difficult to focus. But focusing is a skill that the educational system is designed to test. Some professors see the current accommodations regime as propping up students who shouldn’t have perfect scores. “If we want our grades to be meaningful, they should reflect what the student is capable of,” Steven Sloman, a cognitive-science professor at Brown, told me. “Once they’re past Brown and off in the real world, that’s going to affect their performance.””

Why It’s Time to Drop Diagnoses & Labels

* Someone commented on our episode on sexual morality that it would be nice if people could “just be.”

* Why, today, do you need a label for everything? Like, why does everyone have:

* A sexual identity

* A gender identity

* DSM diagnoses

* Physical diagnoses

* A Myers Briggs profile

* A star sign

Like, I see YouTubers conspicuously bring up that they have POTS like it matters when… OK, sometimes they faint.

Actions should speak louder than words. Society would be better off with an emphasis on actions, not identities.

Episode Transcript

Simone Collins: [00:00:00] Hello Malcolm. I’m excited to be speaking with you today because we’re gonna be talking about how disability accommodation at universities is getting insane, both in scale and in nature.

So from a recent Atlantic article on the issue I’m just quoting, this year, 38% of Stanford undergraduates are registered as having a disability. In the fall quarter, 24% of undergraduates were receiving academic or housing accommodations, say 27%, 38% have a registered disability. 24% were receiving accommodations.

One administrator told me that a student at a public college in California had permission to bring their mother to class. This became a problem because the mom turned out to be an enthusiastic class participant. Oh my gosh. Can you imagine like,

Malcolm Collins: mom participating, how does this not embarrass you?

Who is this person? How did, how did the student not [00:01:00] die

Simone Collins: of mortification? And, and I can get into it, but the, these out of control numbers are mostly coming from people who are gaming the system. It’s driven by, I, by

Malcolm Collins: the way, I, I gained the system with disabilities. Yeah, I got a, well, I wouldn’t say gain the system.

I mean, I, I, I feel like I, I definitely, you, you

Simone Collins: benefited from accommodations. We can put it that way, right? That’s fair.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Like, like untimed testing everything. I had to do everything on computer. That one I actually really,

Simone Collins: the computer thing? Yeah. You actually like, his handwriting is actually legible, so that one was real one.

After yesterday’s episode of me calling Garveyism GRA and saying that he was a skill seller instead of a silk seller, I don’t think you’re gonna disbelieve my

dyslexia after that.

Malcolm Collins: I have to take all testing alone. Never took it in a, in a room with other people. Yeah yeah, so, and I, I did this. So college in high school,

Simone Collins: these, it’s, it’s now I think, way more out of proportion than it was before. And [00:02:00] what’s clear in the discourse on X about this Atlantic article, which has been quite interesting is that people have really pointed out the reason why a lot of these numbers have ballooned, right?

So Stanford. Really has this, this insane proportion. Right. 38%. Like at some point, you know, they’re just, everyone at Stanford is gonna be disabled, but

Malcolm Collins: everyone is a disabled.

Speaker: And when everyone’s super.

Speaker 3: No one will be.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I mean like, and that’s a genuine problem that now universities are talking about, right?

Like, well, how do we even. Like when everyone is being accommodated, what does it even mean to accommodate? But so it was, it’s pretty crazy that that many people already at Stanford are like that. But it, what’s that quote about like, you know, if, if you measure it, like it’s, it’s gonna get manipulated somehow.

Speaker 5: You are disabled. What? Why not? You’re not disabled. You’re getting in trouble. . It’s illegal. [00:03:00] I don’t think so.

Hello? Hello. You are right now. Um, do you need help? I’m disabled. Move back. What are you doing? Don’t panic from the dog. What? No.

So, uh, what happened? I’m disabled. How, how, what? Yeah. How are you disabled? Uh, they’re disabled. Wait, I’m being. Do you have a wheelchair? Yes. Yeah.

Stolen.

Simone Collins: Someone pointed out with on, on [00:04:00] X, that with Stanford, because you can use a disability qualification to get a guaranteed single dorm. That’s one of the big reasons why Stanford specifically has these insane high numbers. You can, and I would 100% have done that. Actually, you don’t know this, but one of the reasons why I went to GW instead of UCLA or uc, Berkeley, was the dorms, the George Washington University in dc.

At least when I went, probably still is, was famous for, its really nice dorms. Like they just bought hotels in downtown Washington, DC I didn’t think

Malcolm Collins: that. Nice. I stayed in some of their dorms and I, I when I was looking at maybe you stayed in crappy

Simone Collins: dorms, but like, they bought old apartment buildings.

They bought old hotels and like for two years in a row, I just stayed. A converted hotel and it was like still like the hotel wallpaper and the hotel like kitchenette and like all the, it was like for me, for a college student, it was really nice. It, my freshman year I stayed in. [00:05:00] A, a pretty much like brand new, really nice accommodations.

Compare that to the dorms in UCLA and I, I remember like instantly when I saw the dorms, I was like, Nope. Just like, seriously, Nope. I just like, Nope, I’m not going to UCLA. I had a scholarship to UCLA. I got a to UC Berkeley, like, and, but the dorms, this, yeah. Had a scholarship at Berkeley. I did, I had a, a, a very mild scholarship to Berkeley and then I had a decent, like, pretty nice scholarship to UCLA and I got into a special program at the, at uc Santa Cruz.

So I could have gone to any of those. Well, I’m glad you didn’t go to

Malcolm Collins: Santa Cruz. That’d be even worse than gw.

Simone Collins: No. Nice campus though. But yeah. But like the, the dorms there, I remember walking into a dorm room and it was like. I think it was four bunk beds, or sorry, sorry, two bunk beds. So four people in one tiny room, a shared bathroom down the hall, like just, it looked like a jail cell.

It was so awful. And I’m like, absolutely not. So I can, I absolutely understand why a [00:06:00] student would bend over backward. Just to get a private room. And that’s, well, the thing

Malcolm Collins: is, is that you get so much, so let’s talk about all the things I wanna go over, all the things that I was able to get with disabilities, even back in the day.

Okay. Yeah. Break. Yeah. Back. Yeah. Break it

Simone Collins: down. Break

Malcolm Collins: it down. Right. And I got all of this because my mom was an. Expert at the system. Like this wasn’t like my plan to get all of this. She was the one who sort of started my past to getting, like, basically showed me that the system existed and how to begin gaming it, and then I just continued it from there.

Simone Collins: Oh, she was a closer on everything. She knew how to like zero. Yeah. So when she knew that something would give you a benefit, anyone benefit? I took

Malcolm Collins: exams in private or at least in a room with only a few people. Mm-hmm. Oftentimes. Not even monitored. So if I wanted to cheat, I could, oh my goodness. Two, I did them on a computer because I have dysgraphia.

This is like very real. It’s actual, I would’ve really struggled in school without the, I, I, I cannot hand write. One for

Simone Collins: no’s gonna be a problem. Writing looks like a kindergartner’s.

Malcolm Collins: I’m

Simone Collins: sorry buddy.

Malcolm Collins: I’m sorry. [00:07:00] For our kids, when people start using handwriting as a way to get around AI or people may be using ai.

So we’ll see what happens there at the schools that restrict that. But it doesn’t really matter. I mean, any school that’s restricting that is not really educating kids because. You live in a world where AI is your companion. So learning to get really good at doing something without AI is just pointless and, and destructive.

Actually, I’ve noticed this with coding where people who I’ve worked with who are like good coders, I can often go faster than they can in the same amount of time and sometimes solve issues that they have been unable to solve because they over rely on older ways of doing it with, without ai.

Right, like this direct coding. And I’ve I was talking with my brother recently actually, and I learned he learned to vibe code, but he learned to vibe code before the era of Cursor and Windsurf. So he does it by dumping the code directly into GPT, which is just like strictly a worse way to vibe code.

And that’s OG vibe

Simone Collins: coding, though. That’s how it used to be.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, no, it, it’s how, it’s how it [00:08:00] used to be, but like, he also can’t keep up with it because I, I’ve learned how to do it within the ecosystem of the new Vibe coding apps. But. To get back to the, the system here. So, doing everything on computer.

Now oftentimes, especially early in my career, the computer would be locked or it wouldn’t have additional apps. But by the time I was in college, I was just like on my own computer often. Oh, you just bring your

Simone Collins: own

Malcolm Collins: comp. Good. Nice. On my computer. Hopefully my notes weren’t on there. Honor scouts, honor.

I mean, I, I, I did fall it because I’m a paranoid person, but you know, not because I’m a moral person. Mind you yeah, you were

Simone Collins: just sure that you, and then I’d get extended

Malcolm Collins: time. So I get extended time on you know, pretty much all of my whatever exams, both like, like I could get infinite time on regular exams, and I typically got double time or 50% more time on things like my GMATs and SATs and stuff like that.

Simone Collins: Must be nice.

Malcolm Collins: So I like, people are like, oh, you know, you, you have all these fancy degrees. And so it’s like, well, yeah, and [00:09:00] partially I game the system, right? Like, and I, I think that people can be like, well then. You know, you, you’re not really at the same level of quality of like the other people at Stanford Business School or St.

Andrew’s or anything like that. And I’d point out, I’d be like, well, I’ve, I’ve done more with my life than a lot of the other people at these who, who are my classmates at these? So clearly my ability to game the system was predictive of one category of real. Skill that has ended up serving me as an adult.

And note here, when I say game in the system, I really did have disabilities. Oh. And in addition to all of that, I was allowed to do the tests on amphetamines which is, you know, what Ritalin is and stuff like that, right? Yeah. So, so, so, you know, other people are just like raw dogging these tests and giant rooms of students.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And here you are, like hopped up. Extra time on your computer. That is, that is insane.

Malcolm Collins: But the, the point I’m making here is learning how to adapt to and game bureaucratic systems like this [00:10:00] is an important skill. Like, like to, to have. A more important skill and a more important test that I think is, is accurately reflected in the higher score because you’re gonna game all of life to your advantage, you know, as as you move forward.

Yeah. And you can’t, people say you can’t do that when you reach, when you get into Google. Oh yeah. You could do that when you get into Google. Oh yeah. You can do that when you’re working it. Amazon, I guess

Simone Collins: you make a really interesting point because you know, a lot of people are like, well. Here, like this, this, this article has sparked a lot of real interesting discourse on X and one person.

Josh Barrow pointed out if you have a condition like a DHD, anxiety or, or depression, and it makes it harder for you to complete tests on time, that is something the tests should measure, not something you should avoid measuring. And then Molly followed up saying, I wonder what happens to these kids upon graduation.

No. Lawyer’s gonna give you extra time on a deadline or let you bring your mom to work and then act even like actually our, our buddy em Khan, right friend [00:11:00] of the pod chimed in. Do you want your lawyer to get more time on their lsat? Do they get more time to bill hours when they work on your case?

Absurd. Now these are all valid points and I think I wanna sort of discuss them in context as well. But the point that you’re making, I think, is also really valid, which is to say that like if I’m hiring kind of what. What makes a lot of competitive edge work for a company these days, or for a lawyer I would have is I want a lawyer who knows how to game the system.

Who knows how to play the game. Yeah. Who knows how to manipulate laws and rules in my favor. And someone who has manipulated laws and rules in their favor throughout their academic career is more likely to be able to do so for me. Same with sales, same with like coding. Same with everything else like you want.

Like if, if the world is now about cheating and about getting ahead through this, this form of manipulation and exploitation and arbitrage, then yeah, you, you need people who know how to play the game. So I think that’s a really interesting, well, hold

Malcolm Collins: on, let’s, let’s talk about the lawyer [00:12:00] question here, right?

Like in part of being a lawyer is getting the case in front of the right judge of having a relationship with that judge. Yeah, this is insane.

Simone Collins: We actually were, i, I think, pitched by a startup at one point that had this really, I don’t know, like, I don’t, I don’t know what happened to them, but they, they had a database that allowed you to see not a lawyer’s success rate, but rather like.

How I think cases played out in front of certain judges. Yeah. So you

Malcolm Collins: could see how often the lawyer won or loyals to certain judges.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. Because that’s, that was kind of the key thing, is that law firms might be able to say, well, here’s our track record, but like, basically they were able to manipulate things in a way that really skewed their actual success rates.

And what you really wanna know is. How do they do vis-a-vis a certain judge which actually

Malcolm Collins: matters so much more mm-hmm. Than their ability to argue or anything like that. Like Yeah. In reality, my response to be is you [00:13:00] come, is I actually would care way more about a person’s ability to skirt systems as a lawyer.

Yeah. Then I would care about their actual argument skills or knowledge of like, legal proceedings, because all of that stuff they can get from the internet or whatever, right? Mm-hmm. Skirting the system skill. That’s an actual human skill, right?

Simone Collins: Well, that’s, it’s, and that’s not just in law that, that’s in, in so, so many different systems.

With, with sales, with marketing.

And this is actually really important, the individual who tells you, I would rather make the job harder for myself than do the thing that through my deontological lens looks like cheating is someone you don’t want to hire. The person who, in the early days of AI says, well, I just refuse to use AI because that’s cheating.

Or, I refuse you the calculator. I’m gonna do it by. That’s a person who you don’t wanna hire. , And I’d say that culturally some cultures are going to really struggle as society continues to move forward. As I’ve mentioned in our Jack tales episode, if you look at Appalachian culture, , you know, the [00:14:00] hero stories were the guy who looked for ways to basically cheat or outwit the people who were much wealthier or smarter or larger or stronger than him.

And that’s what makes you a hero, was in this cultural tradition. And so, you know, when I saw these problems for the first time, that would’ve been the lens through which I saw them. , And I think a lot of people are gonna really struggle in this new world.

Yeah. Actually, I think I might have just hit on something. I, I didn’t even think of this until I was thinking about this episode in reflection afterwards, and this could explain fertility collapse and the collapse of a lot of western civilizational structures. And when I talk about some systems being more resistant, like Appalachian and Jewish culture, then other systems , and I was like, oh my God, I get it.

It is about the level of, , trust of outside systems. So with Jewish culture, they are used to historically being a minority population. Wherever they are with [00:15:00] Appalachian culture, they are used to, , dealing with a system that is set up to screw them over. And so they always looked at the system adversarially.

But if you are in an extremely high trust and homogenous society, and you are. People have, like your culture evolved in a high trusts homogenous society. Breaking rules like this is gonna seem extremely negative to you. Whereas to someone with my cultural background, it just seems like the natural thing to do because the system is of course, adversarial to you and there’s other groups out there that will exploit the system to try to screw you over.

And so a lot of these, , European cultural groups that had evolved to be incredibly high trust. , Because they’re used to this, homogeny are unable to compete within the new system. And really the only thing you can do is either reintroduce homogeny, which is just almost completely unrealistic, , or, , become lower trust at least when you’re dealing with outgroup [00:16:00] populations.

,

And I think even if these groups successfully. Try to reintroduce homogeny along the metrics that they think homogeny works. What they’d quickly find is that there are a lot of people who look the same as them and might be technically the same religion, them that are from different cultural frameworks that will exploit them.

, And like, like again, like my people might do that, right? , And yet you would look at me and think, oh, he looks just, you know, he’s a, a normal white. Christian Guy. Right. , And that’s just due to the nature of travel now and groups intermixing and it being so easy at this point, , you really cannot have a society that relies on high trust anymore, unless that society is something that you have to earn your way into or is sort of like a gated community, which, which you can do like a kibbutz or something like that, but you can’t do at the level of a state.

One of the things that I think is the biggest challenge for a lot of these previously high trusts [00:17:00] cultures is to determine what the ingroup population is and what the outgroup population is. Because they don’t know. They don’t know. Is it other, , people who look like me? Is it other people of my religion?

Is it other people who swear, you know, similar political affiliation to me. The other thing I’d note about all of this that I think is really interesting is. People can be like, well, the disability accommodations were unfair to begin with. So in a way, by opting into them, you are helping break an unfair system.

The final note I’d add that I’d been thinking about afterwards was. People are like, oh, well you won’t get extra time in real life. And the truth is, if you do actually get extra time in real life, I happen to know, you know, from living with other people and everything like that, that I work significantly longer on my homework than other people.

Literally, probably two to three times as much as a lot of the other people on a similar assignment. , And, . I just choose to, right. When you, A weird thing about internalizing that it takes you longer to do things, like extra time on a test, is that you also internalize that [00:18:00] with everything else that you do in your life, you’re going to need to work harder and you don’t feel as bad about it.

I.

Simone Collins: Well, I

Malcolm Collins: mean even, even programming, right? Like I couldn’t beat up programming exam. And yet you know, with this, hopefully as the site comes out, like hopefully we have the new version. We’re trying to get it up stable today, like we’re uploading the new version. But you know, I’ve been able to hire other people with extensive programming backgrounds, as I’ve said, and I just can clearly outcompete them when I’m looking at the, the functional interstate product between the two of.

Simone Collins: Malcolm’s talking about reality fabricator R Fab ai, which is an an AI chat bot site that he’s been working on with Bruno friend of the pod for a long time now. It’s supposed to be like replica character ai, et cetera, but way, way better with encrypted, local saving. It’s, it’s amazing. But anyway, yeah, like, and I, I think that’s.

That’s a really great point that you bring up, and it’s something that wasn’t discussed in the article and it’s something that’s not being discussed in the online discourse, but the only discourse on this is still super fun. Like people are, are coming in [00:19:00] as students or recent students just showing how crazy the problem is.

Okay. How, how, why did they say like Basel wrote? In my high school AP chem class, there were 11 students and I was the only one with. Out double time. So I had to hand in my test early while everyone else in the class got to continue. Ah, which is insane. And then Calder, ew. Shared over a decade ago.

So to your point that this has actually been happening for a long time at the private New York City High School, I attended in an 18 person math class. Once a quiz that only three of us took on time without accommodations, A DHD and a DD tests were just ordered up, and that’s not to mention the tutors, et cetera, that were writing everyone’s essays for them.

As someone with artist’s parents who didn’t know how to and didn’t want to game the system in that way, I felt constantly disadvantaged in the moment, but years later, I’m so grateful that that wasn’t my experience in high. School or [00:20:00] college, because I actually managed to learn something. And they, I’m

Malcolm Collins: gonna push back here.

So because I was at the beginning edge of this, right? Mm-hmm. Uhhuh, but when I was the one doing it, there would maybe three or four other people in the entire school system who had anything like this.

Simone Collins: Whoa.

Malcolm Collins: Like, like I I not school system. I’d say it within my grade, right? Yeah. Okay. So, so if I was like, you know, alone, there’d be like.

Two other, three other people in the room with me. And this was for the entire grade, right? Yeah. So, those people almost always ended up in their professional lives, outcompeting, everyone else at the school, and I mean, by significant margins.

Simone Collins: Well, I mean, one thing that people like and underlying theme of this is that this is just, let’s see. Bobby Fijian described this behavior on X as the upper class version of subway fair jumping. He said breaking rules just because you can and making everyone who follows the rules into chumps. And I mean, well that’s, that’s real Life. Life is chumps versus non chumps. Right? That, yeah. That, that is the interesting [00:21:00] thing.

Like on, on one hand you have everyone who’s. Trying to be moral about this. Getting out competed, I guess like, another person on X put it really well Armand do Doles. Doki noted that quote. One thing I feel like conservatives rock better than liberals is if you create an honor code.

Based on rules that give someone an advantage. Don’t enforce fair collection. Most people pay eventually, even honest people feel compelled to cheat, to avoid being cheated. And I mean, as he’s pointing out, basically like once this sort of becomes a pervasive source of strategic advantage, you have no choice but to participate and you’re, you’re kind of, you’re being, you’re being willfully destructive or, I don’t wanna say dumb, but like it, it’s a dumb choice. To not do the thing that enables you to get ahead when everyone else is doing it.

Malcolm Collins: It a, it’s a dumb choice to not [00:22:00] do the thing, the moment, the option to not do it is there. Mm-hmm. So what I point out here is it very much like that scene in Indiana Jones

Heh, heh,

Malcolm Collins: where, you know, the guy comes out, sw swirling the swords, and he is like, Indiana Jones just pulls out a gun and shoots like, I’m not playing that game like, I have a gun.

Like, why would I, why would I play by your. Dumb sword game where we both do a big like, show of it, right? Like yeah, yeah. But it’s just like, I don’t wanna get

Simone Collins: cut. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: I mean, life is a battlefield, right? Like Yeah. When you, when you’re, when you’re playing in a multicultural society, right? Like maybe if it was one culture and everyone I was competing against was essentially.

Like me and not playing across my rules and across my value systems. Mm-hmm. Which many are. Mm-hmm. Then, okay, this makes sense. Mm-hmm. But if you are getting, but we don’t live in

Simone Collins: a high trust culture. [00:23:00]

Malcolm Collins: We don’t, yeah. Yeah. We don’t. You acting high trust. Basically these people are saying you should act high trust in a multicultural ecosystem where other cultures are not high trust.

Yeah. That is the easiest way to get your teeth kicked in by life. Yeah. Whereas as

Simone Collins: Michael Gibson, you know, also. Someone we’ve, we’ve met a bunch of times who’s, he’s great. He had a great zinger on this that I think sort of feeds into this. He, he, which is exactly why socialism doesn’t work in multicultural society.

So he writes to each, according to their need, creates a society where people. Compete to be victims. And that’s that’s a great point from

Malcolm Collins: each of, I’ve never

Simone Collins: heard it. He’s so, he’s so articulate.

Malcolm Collins: He’s, yeah. That’s actually a, that’s a really, we have an episode with him, by the way, if people wanna shout out.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Another friend of the pod got, yeah. He said, like, and I mean, everyone’s weighing in on this re’s in Michael Gibson is in.

Malcolm Collins: No, but I, I think it, it does, like that’s actually what you are being judged on. Mm-hmm. Like meaningfully judged on. Right. And. I, I, I know that there’s going to be people here.

‘cause [00:24:00] you know, you, we think get sort of circles, you get deontologists who think that their deontological logic is like actual morality. Mm-hmm. And I’m like, never cheat,

Simone Collins: never lie, never game. The system

Malcolm Collins: never cheat, never lie. And they get left in the

Simone Collins: dust. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Meanwhile, their people end up getting cut out of reality.

Well, I think

Simone Collins: yeah, like the, the, they’re sort of missing that like, well, I’m sorry, this is the new test. The new test is, you know, can, it’s like a trick question. Like Right. The question was never like, can you answer two plus two? It’s can you pick up the calculator that you’re not supposed to pick up? And not that you need to add two plus two, but you know what I mean?

No,

Malcolm Collins: No. It’s, it’s, it’s actually, you know, this, this again shows where, you know, even in America, you’re dealing with. Cultures that are, that are going to be different from you and are gonna have different ways of relating to this stuff. Mm-hmm. And I’ve pointed out, you know, in the past, if you, if you want to understand the way my culture would’ve taught me how to relate to this you can look at our episode on the Jack Tails, right?

Mm-hmm. Which are common within the, the greater Appalachian cultural [00:25:00] tradition. And in the Jack Tails you had, Jack, you, you’re probably familiar with one Jack and the Beanstalk, but there’s, there’s many of these. There’s many, and it was about a. A young trickster male who would take people who are either wealthier or bigger or more powerful than him, and often trick them into killing themselves and then take all their stuff.

That was, that was often the gist of, I mean, you read that, you know, we, we point out like you can read Jack and the Beanstalk and be like, wait, did, did he just like murder? Like in some versions of the more cleaned up versions today, the, the, the giant has wronged him. In the original version, the giant.

Simone Collins: He’s just

Malcolm Collins: living his

Simone Collins: life.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. He’s just like, Hey, the giant has a lot of stuff. I’ll take that. Yeah, yeah. But what I’m saying is, is, is if you grow up learning morality from these sorts of traditions, this seems like the most natural thing in the world to you. Like, oh, if it works, you know, I’m, and better yet, I’m not even breaking any rule.

Right? Like I’m, I’m playing the system as it’s laid out. I’m playing a card. And people are like, well, my parents are artists, so I didn’t have access to this [00:26:00] type of stuff. It’s like, you could have learned, like, you could have Googled like, why did my mom know about this stuff? You know, not, not, she knew about this stuff because she investigated it and she, she woke me up to it before other people woke it up to it.

As soon as I was woken up to it, I was like, whoa, this is cool. I should learn more about this. Right.

Simone Collins: So what they talk about in the, in the article is that what often happens is. You know, in high school someone’s classmate gets extra accommodation and they’re like, well, my mom just had me take this evaluation and like, now I, and then it’s like, well, hey mom, like I want this.

And some people are like, it’s like this, this rite of passage in elite high schools. Like you turn 16 and you get your A DHD diagnosis and then you get an easier time on tests. That, you know? Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And I’d have to point out to people because I think that there’s this myth that if you gain access to this sort of stuff, that you’re not gonna be able to compete in top level environments.

And that’s just wrong. You know, I’ve had access to this stuff since middle school and in college I went, you know, undergrad to St. Andrews, which is occasionally, I don’t know if it, it still is, but [00:27:00] it’s often on ranked the top school in the uk. It’s, it’s almost always was in the top four. You know, often beating Oxford and Cambridge.

And so, I was there and I graduated with a two one, right, which is a, a very high score. And regularly I was top of my class. And then at Stanford for business school, which is another, you know, one of the top graduate schools in the world. By the time I graduated at first, I really. In year one, I really struggled, but by the time I graduated, I was in the top quarter or so.

No, I would, I I I was easily in the top quarter, if I remember. I might have been in the top eights. But the point being is that like these people, I think that there’s these smug fantasies that people build for themselves mm-hmm. That the people who, take the, the, these alternative options in the system are going to be at some sort of like permanent life disadvantage because they want to believe that if they play by the rules that the people who are more creative with how they engage with the rules in the system that are thinking outside the box of the rules as the deontologist understands them.

And it’s like, you know, as long as I’m not. [00:28:00] You know, functionally or technically breaking any rules, I’m allowed to, to, to move with this pathway that these people like just end up like under leveled or undertrained, and that is not. Both not my experience and not what I’ve seen in the real world.

In, in fact now that I think about it, what’s really interesting is the number one, because when I was young, before any of these systems existed Mm. I was in the the gifted program. So this was in, in my public school. You did, were you, do you have a gifted program at your public school? Simon?

Yeah. Okay. So did you, were you in it or, yeah.