in his influential disjointness paper, h. furstenberg proved that weakly-mixing systems are disjoint from irrational rotations (and in general, kronecker systems), a result that inspired much of the modern research in dynamics. recently, a. venkatesh managed to prove a quantitative version of this disjointness theorem for the case of the horocyclic flow on a compact riemann surface. i will discuss venkatesh's disjointness result and present a generalization of this result to more general actions of nilpotent groups, utilizing structural results about nilflows proven by green-tao-ziegler. if time permits, i will discuss applications of such theorems in sparse equidistribution problems and number theory.