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Comment by cs1717p | Hacker News Reader

Two things:

One, academia (for many reasons) tends toward liberal group think.

Two, interestingly, many of the most intelligent and successful (especially self made) people tend to be libertarian or conservative.

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I see that in most of the first world countries 'self'made' is a very incorrectly used word, no one can be completely 'self-made'

No idea why you're getting down voted here. It's absolutely true. If you start a business, hire a bunch of people, and are very successful, congrats. You've probably worked very hard. But self-made? No.

Your business benefitted from having your employees educated (at least K-12), being protected from crime by all levels of law enforcement, being protected from foreign invasion by the military, being protected by fire by the local fire department. Your goods can be shipped via roads built and paid for by the government. Etc. No man is an island.

Everyone (within first world geopolitical borders, at least) has access to all of those things though. Self-made still refers to the part that sets the individual apart. The dictionary seems fairly clear on that.

No, everyone in the first world doesn't have equal access to those things, even within any given country, and the people described as "self-made" disproportionately come from the segment with better-than-average access to them.

I think you may be attaching way too much meaning to the definition of self-made, or perhaps haven't actually looked up the definition. It doesn't mean that someone was able to succeed in a vacuum.

I'm not even discussing the definition of self-made, I'm pointing out that, in fact, the claim made upthread that access to certain things is universal in the first world and they the self-made vary from the norm in other ways simply is (1) based on a false premise, and (2) is not accurate of the situations where the term is used, even accepting that the proposed definition is exactly what it is meant to convey.

Which countries in question do not provide roads, public education, police, military, and fire fighting services to the population at large?

How can we discuss where the term is used inappropriately without discussing what the term means?

Can you please elaborate on your first point, or provide a few examples of reasons that academia tends toward liberal group think?

I can't find it since I'm at work right now but Jonathan Haidt has some great work on this. Liberal group think is present, but only really dominates the social sciences/humanities. But in these fields liberal group think has increasingly dominated since 2000. He has some stuff on departments going from 3:1 liberal:conservative to more like 10:1.

Yeah, my engineering classes at Cal were mostly close readings of Karl Marx.

Engels really grokked angles.

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