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My sister wouldn't have graduated college without the extra time provided by disability accommodations for dyslexia and dyscalculia. I spent an entire semester of her undergrad with her on video calls (as emotional support, and as someone she could trust would get the right final answer), watching her torturously dragging herself through mandatory remidial physics and algebra classes that have never once been relevant to her professional endeavors, and I had a front-row seat to the frustration and exhaustion induced by learning disabilities on otherwise exceptional people. It takes her minutes to do problems I can do in my head - not because I'm any smarter, but because she literally can't read what the problem is asking without making symbol transposition/translation errors, and has to redo every problem about five times to arbitrate the inevitable failed attempts.
That extra time let her squeak through the remedial courses with a passing grade. Years later, she's now a successful practicing psychiatrist, and I'm confident that several of her needs-based clients would say she has utilized her education for the betterment of society.
I also don't think this had anything to do with our parents pushing parenting duties onto teachers. For all their other flaws, not once did they ever abdicate any parental responsibilities. They pushed for disability accommodations because they wanted my sister to be given a chance to prove herself, and spent years researching and trying different approaches, alongside private tutors and disability specialists, at great personal cost, to help my sister over her hump. And it worked! And if the schools didn't give her extra time on her tests, she would have flunked out of college and it would have all been for naught.
I agree that the disability accommodation system is full of parents making their children someone else's problem, and this is probably the majority of its use now. There's a level-headed argument to be made that the cost to society of exploiting that system is way more than the benefit for the handful of people like my sister. I just want to point out that there are people benefitting from disability accommodations in a way that doesn't encourage learned helplessness later in life.
A lot of people are jumping on this so I'll give my two cents as a diagnosed dyslexic. Only being privy to the one experience I cannot be totally sure if dyslexia is a real thing or not as I can't directly experience how others interact with words. I will say that I find reading long texts difficult and tedious, frequently needing to reread sections and losing my position while doing so. I never actually used my diagnosis besides getting some side lessons in elementary and middle school. I took the ACT without any help and my lowest section was actually science because I only completed about half of the questions within the time frame despite getting them all right. This probably resulted in getting less scholarships/into less prestigious colleges than I would have otherwise.
I think @blooblyblobl 's sister is probably fine as a doctor, it's not like you literally cannot focus and interpret text or that big proper nouns will get confused with each other. It's that as you try to read faster text gets kind of jumbled and you need to slow down and reread sections. There are plenty of coping mechanisms.
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I find it unsurprising and troubling that your sister went into psychiatry, the wooliest field of medicine which is least amenable to objective oversight (ie a bad psych can go unmolested for a long time in a way that a bad anæsthesiologist can not)
From the description you've provided it's... A bit horrifying that your sister is actually practicing as a doctor. I'm sure she says she "can do it", but look - there were plenty of conmen throughout the twentieth century who practiced as doctors, successfully, without any medical training. Even surgeons! And I'm sure plenty of their colleagues would have said they were fine doctors, not knowing about their absent/fraudulent qualifications. Many conmen did this for years and years!
The fact that your sister has not yet run into a situation where her incapacity causes some public disaster is meh.
If the description you've provided is accurate, she doesn't have the requisite mental equipment to be a doctor, and it's a serious indictment of whatever country's medical school she graduated from that she's practicing as one. Horrifying tbh
Without commenting on the sister in particular, I do find these sorts of stories ironically depressing.
"I suffer from severe [performance inhibiting condition], and yet through incredible perseverance, added efforts from friends, family, etc., a few convenient accommodations, and some really painful medical interventions, I was able to become a mediocre practitioner in [Career Field]!"
Like man, you had to ignore a lot of incentives, advice, and straight up warning signs to push through to become, at best, approximately as good as the average person who doesn't have your condition. When you might have ended up a lot happier just following the economic signals and going down a path that didn't require 5x the resources to produce 2/3 of the optimal outcome.
Like, imagine a 5'2" dude REALLY wanted to play in the NBA. So he does severe training regimens, he gets leg lengthening surgery, he has extensive coaching from ex-NBA stars, and finally, he manages to convince the NBA to let him wear stilts on the Court as an accommodation. And After all this, he makes it to the NBA and performs at a slightly below average level overall. Which is impressive for him! But that's a lot of resources spent to get the guy up to merely 'adequate' performance, which is to say he's not contributing much to the overall success, despite all the inputs required to get him there.
When the guy with that sort of willpower and drive could have found his true calling as a Horse Jockey at a much lower price for everyone.
Well, does our hypothetical manlet want to be a horse jockey? Would he find it fulfilling, compared to his strongly indicated preference of merely playing professional basketball?
I'm getting a takeaway of "if you don't have a realistic chance of being the best, or at least above average in your chosen field, you're doing the wrong thing pursuing it." I don't agree with this, even though I think we'd agree on a close converse of "if you could be the best, or above average at an occupation, it's not wrong to pursue it."
Is "contributing to the overall success [of the NBA]" as you put it expressed solely by players at the peak of natural talent and aptitude, or is there room for people doing "just OK, slightly below average, could've been amazing at something else" to keep the show going on? Like, sure it's not optimal, is it actually wrong in your estimation?
(Not to get totally sidetracked by the analogy, I think my line of questioning still tracks to the original topic at least.)
"Field Fillers" and Jobbers are a thing in the more entertainment-oriented sports, at least.
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I think, again, as matter of politics, of giving these kinds of helps when you could simply bend to the path that doesn’t require so many resources, I think there’s a point at which the public is not served by giving basketball lessons to short people. Lots of people don’t get to do the jobs they want, either from lack of ability, or poverty, or being born in the wrong region, or family culture. I think this is an immensely unreasonable approach to finding a career for a whole host of reasons starting with ability and leading through technological advancement, pay for the work, demand, and so on. If I want to be a dog walker, I can do so, but given the low wage, low demand, and the fact that a person can probably build a dog walking robot would make offering this as a job training program rather stupid — especially if the student is sitting in a wheelchair.
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I mean, if you know you’ll be quite bad at an important field lots of people want to go into, it seems quite selfish to insist on going in anyways.
It is probably better if everyone gets a living; that is not equal to everyone fulfilling their hopes and dreams. Sometimes your hopes and dreams are stupid.
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"If it will cost you 5000 hours of time and $200,000+ in 'extra' efforts to get to a particular position, it behooves you to figure out if the payoff is worthwhile." I can 'believe' that the extra utils the manlet gets from becoming an NBA player might pay off for him.
BUT... its not clear that he'll really be happier/better off/wealthier than he would have been going for a more directly attainable goal.
I don't want to imply that his only alternate choice is horse jockey. Flyweight MMA Champion of the World is absolutely on the table, for example. But if he decides he'd like to instead be the Heavyweight champion, should we celebrate his decision to on a massive regimen of steroids, get risky surgeries, and bulk himself up at the expense of his mental and physical wellbeing just so he can get outclassed by the 'natural' heavyweights?
What's the point?
Part of the secret to a happy/content life, I think, is 'setting realistic goals'. And in situations where your skill at a given job has other people's lives hanging in the balance, then yes, you really DO need to be especially good at it.
The nice thing about playing in the NBA is that individual screwups will almost never be fatal. We can 'afford' to indulge somebody's fantasies there without much collateral 'damage.'
But I wouldn't want an epileptic to become an airline pilot, even if they 'overcame the odds' to get through flight school and have hundreds of hours of successful flight time under their belts. (note, if a proven 'cure' for epilepsy existed, this would be a different situation). For the love of God just do not choose a career where a single incident can kill a hundred people!
That's fair and I think we're on the same page. Thank you for the elaboration. :)
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This seems clearly true for tournament professions, where only the best get a high payoff. If you have no chance of making it out of the NBA G-league, basketball probably isn't the field for you. If you have no chance of making it IN to the NBA G-league, it definitely isn't.
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Children take algebra in middle school. If we want our doctors to be the best, or even good, then we simply cannot have anyone who struggles with middle school mathematics as an adult. Questionable that someone who struggles with remedial algebra is in college, much less med school. How did she get in? Don't you have to take like the MCAT? Are you overselling here disability? You're describing a woman who can barely read...
oh god, she can't even read and shes a doctor prescribing medication. What if she needed to read it six times instead of five, would she even know? You're telling us she is incapable of deciphering words.
A disabled doctor. I'm glad your sister got to prove herself at the expense of the health of her patients. Good for her, I'm sure she is really self actualized.
I know this sounds really rude, but I don't know your sister. I know her through your words. And you have told me she is someone who can barely read, struggles with basic math, and also prescribes extremely vulnerable patients powerful medication. If what you're telling us is accurate, its just evil. Its your sister putting her aspirations over the health of her patients. No, your sister who can't read shouldn't be a doctor. How did she get through med school? Can she really not read?
I think it's far more likely that the person you're replying to is overstating or accidentally exaggerating the degree of disability here.
I have a hard time imagining someone who can't read becoming a doctor. Maths? The most that average doctors do is basic arithmetic or algebra that's middle school level.
I'm talking figuring out what x should be when when trying to divide doses or transform one unit of measurement to another. With a calculator at hand, and a willingness to redo sums multiple times, even someone with severe impairment would probably manage. These days, you can just look up doses for just about every drug under the sun online.
I struggle to think of any occasion I'd run into in clinical practise where I'd be expected to do more, if I was conducting a study or analyzing a research paper, I'd probably have to brush up my stats and maybe learn something that school or med school didn't teach me.
Funnily enough, I'm in psych training, and also have what could loosely be described as a learning difficulty in the form of ADHD. I never asked for nor received extra time or additional adjustments on the exams I had to clear, as far as the standardized tests in India were concerned, you had to be missing an arm or something to qualify for that. Google tells me that people with dysgraphia could get extra time, but I'll be damned if I heard of that ever happening, or anyone I ran into in my career who fit the bill.
Knowledge, both procedural and arcane, matter the most in med school. I'd hope that this lady had that, and had coping mechanisms that let her circumvent her issues. If she's made it this far, without being sued into oblivion, she can probably handle herself.
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Maybe she just has really low ability in maths but has otherwise fine working memory and similar.
Some people are like that.
And she can just use AI for maths.
Bad take, dude. AI makes lots of mistakes. How is she supposed to discover them?
Deepseek R1 is surely better at maths than most people on this forum and doubtless far superior to this doctor: https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1i5r85h/deepseekr1_scored_100_on_a_2023_a_levels/
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I have a general concern about people who "literally can't read what the problem is asking without making symbol transposition/translation errors" doing work that requires understanding complex medical literature and prescribing minute quantities of similarly named drugs where there's no check on their work (other than the dispensing pharmacist perhaps noticing something looks weird). I feel for your sister's difficulty in school and I'm glad she's been successful, but it makes me wonder if it is wise for us to provide these accommodations for academic testing when the job is going to require those skills to function at a certain level, and the only thing anyone has to go by for hiring is the credential.
(This generalizes to a lot of other problems with credentialing and affirmative action and so forth, but the subject of your post brought it into sharp relief for me.)
His sister is a psychiatrist not pharmacist
Whoops, I guess this is what happens when I post when sleep deprived
TBF those two words are very similar and easily confused if your brain happens to like... swap some letters around.
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To whom would you rather trust your well-being:
I think you are significantly overestimating the scope of the problem - her failure mode was losing points for questions she did not have time to answer, as opposed to answering questions wrongly, on a timed test with pencil and paper. This is demonstrably not a representative model of the real world, in which computers, colleagues, and the spoken word exist, variables may be named at one's pleasure, operators correspond to explicit and distinct positions on the keyboard, and you get at least half a decade of extra practice before they let you loose on the unsuspecting populace. Today, her learning disabilities are effectively non-issues; in fact, her meticulousness means she tends to catch mistakes made by others as well (which has made for some colorful stories).
It is precisely this kind of tractable problem, which only really exists in a pedagogical spherical-cow setting, that requires accommodations, as opposed to nebulous claims of racial or mental victimhood from the lazy, the conniving, or the otherwise unqualified comprising the median. The challenge, as it has always been, is telling them apart. Again, there's an argument to be made that it's not worth it to try, and it may even be a good one. But it's not open-and-shut.
I'm genuinely very curious, being also a medical professional, how a person who "literally can't read [text] without making symbol transposition/translation errors" could read medical histories and patient documentation, or keep up with new literature. I could not do my job if I was dyslexic to that level, or at least I would be performing much more inefficiently.
If there's some sort of intervention that "cures" the dyslexia so much so that word and sentence recognition and parsing becomes "native" or at the very least second nature, that would make sense -- but I am to understand that dyslexia isn't really "curable". Or if psychiatrists to read very little medical documentation, which...seems incorrect to me in experience.
Open to be wrong, I don't have any experience with this personally.
One of my coworkers is a PhD in computer science with dyslexia. When he reads academic papers he puts them on a screen using a plugin which colors every word a different color. His output is pretty good, so it must work for him. But he also is in the top 5% of extroversion for software engineers, presumably making up for some of that tough paper reading with social connections.
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There are lots of ways to read and write text other than the default font by unaided eye. There are laptops and stuff. If you have access to windows, check out the Ease of Access Center for the freebies.i
Hm. I was thinking more paper charts, but I suppose if there are fonts in a digital system that works.
I was also under the impression that dyslexic fonts don’t have a great track record, but if it works for someone…
Now I wonder if there is a difference in difficulty reading for dyslexics when they have to read from an alphabet or syllabary vs when they read from a logographic script.
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Weighted fonts are one method by which things can be made easier on dyslexics. Notably, Comic Sans is surprisingly useful as one in a pinch, though still beaten out by purpose-built fonts.
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Yes, the whole theoretical point of academic tests is to be an objective measure of the capacity of students. Because when you go out and get a real job, you have to actually be able to do that job. If these remedial courses aren't necessary for being a psychiatrist, then there should be a path to becoming a practicing psychiatrist that doesn't require them. If they ARE necessary, then lightening the requirements because, gosh, you can't satisfy the requirements but really want to graduate ends up causing harm later on in life.
I mean, these classes are far from the only example of things you don’t need. We make doctors get bachelors degrees that require literature and history classes for essentially class reasons.
I do always think of the local-ish story of the Native American law student forced to take math classes at ASU. Now, sure, depending on the specific field of law, math may actually prove to be a useful skill to have, but I could probably imagine some areas of law where it's not really necessary.
Hard to properly and believably inflate your billable hours when you can't do math.
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Other peer countries (culturally and economically) don’t, though, it’s solely a peculiarity of the American college system.
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