And most available evidence suggests she did not get there through high intelligence, in lieu of a university education, but rather, complete and utter greed.
Edit: you keep editing your comments, but I was replying to the self-quote, which, at the time was your entire comment.
My first entry level job required C# knowledge. So I went to the nearest Barnes and Nobles and read the Microsoft guide cover to cover. I was not a C# major in uni but being able to study, abstract, and internalize concepts was something I did learn.
The usual retort is why not bring someone in as a junior, train them, and give them a raise to market rates? But then you’ve invested x amount of dollars on someone and y amount of time to bring them up to speed when you can find someone who already has the skill you need and they can hit the ground running.
Even worse, some junior developers do “negative work”. Work that is so bad, you have to take more time to undo the damage than just doing it yourself.
Whether it’s right or not, the only way for a potential employee to break that cycle is via side projects that they can show as experience.
The purpose of this period of working class rule is to eradicate the capitalist class and its ideology (not necessarily through violence, although in practice what ruling class yields to another without compulsion?), and develop the productive forces of the society in order to enable communism.
This last point is one of the big things that distinguishes Lenin's theories from Marx's, because Marx thought that revolution would naturally arise in the most advanced technological societies once the industrial base necessary for a transition to communism was already pretty much in place. As we know, the revolutions occurred in places with a lower level of development, thus requiring this theoretical modification and extending the period of rule by the working class beyond the brief duration that Marx envisaged.
The USSR, while it existed, always said they were "building socialism" and never said they had arrived at the destination, which is a classless society. The PRC says that it is "building socialism" and that the process might take a hundred generations. The purpose of their rule, according to their own theoretical framework, is to eventually give it up.
So no, Marxists are not "even more in favour of a ruling class above all."
The peasants did not go willingly.
We can see it, for example, in the GDR, the former East of Germany where social sciences basically died. At the very same time, West-Germany developed a hugely influential discourse (...with a lot of Marxists, despite all the tensions).
One could say that specific individuals from academia might profit from having symbolic capital to convert into political power, but that's hardly an idea that could be universally applied.
How is it controversial that it is easier for someone who is directly employed by the state to be a socialist?
You mention Marxist discourse in West Germany. It was easy for Adorno to be a socialist, because all he could do was talk in a convoluted, content-free manner.
Celibidache (who actually did something), called him the biggest windbag of the 20th century.
I wonder how they're distributed among the various disciplines.
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/03/the_prevalence_1...
I gotta think they are more idealists than bona fide marxists though; I mean, if they read enough, they must know the drill (they wouldn’t have influence and any countertevolutionary ideas and they are sent off).
Here's some discussion from a review of Disciplined Minds by Brian Martin:
> Jeff Schmidt provides an answer in his book Disciplined Minds: professionals, including teachers, are selected and molded to have politically and intellectually subordinate attitudes, thereby making their creative energies available to the system. In short, "professional education and employment push people to accept a role in which they do not make a significant difference, a politically subordinate role." (p. 2).
> The first step in Schmidt’s argument is the claim that professionals - including police, doctors, lawyers, teachers and many others - think less independently than nonprofessionals. He cites opinion polls taken during the Vietnam war showing that support for the war was greater among those with more higher education.
> Schmidt argues that what really makes an individual a professional is not technical knowledge, but rather "ideological discipline."
> A key to creating docile professionals is professional training. Through their training, budding professionals learn to orient their intellectual effort to tasks assigned to them. Schmidt has a wonderful expression for this: "assignable curiosity." Children are naturally curious about all sorts of things. Along the road to becoming a professional, they learn how to orient this curiosity to tasks assigned by others.
https://www.uow.edu.au/~bmartin/pubs/01BRrt.html
The journalist Lyn Gerry read and recorded most of the chapters in the book, they can be listened to here: https://www.unwelcomeguests.net/Disciplined_Minds
The rationale for American intervention in Vietnam, rightly or wrongly, was based on sophisticated geopolitical concerns. Things that are harder to understand tend to be better understood by more educated people for fairly obvious reasons. US intervention in World War II, to name one counterexample, was justified by a sneak attack on American sailors in Hawaii. Almost any idiot understood why we were fighting then.
Another difference was media influence, with the media firmly in favor of America going to war against Japan and Germany, and firmly opposed to America going to war against North Vietnam. If something is harder to understand, and the overwhelming message from the mass media is one of opposition to the government's position, then most uneducated people will oppose it. It's not that complicated.
ie, people whose peers and children were less likely to be drafted.
Of course they did. It wasn’t them or their kids getting drafted....
76% of the men sent to Vietnam were from lower middle/working class backgrounds.
That said - just like in Science - the consensus among thoughtfully educated people is probably 'more correct'.
Where things can go wrong ... is when the systematic class is wrong, or where there is a value shift.
Populism is a super example of this: educated business type see the world through economic lenses, and can't for a second understand how 'Brexit' could happen. Most people have an affinity for their culture and a few extra cents on off their pint (and massively more surpluses in the pockets of bankers) is not going to change their mind over it.
Doctors are a funny bunch in this regard: all of them seem to me to be the most intelligent, boring folks! They have to be in a way extremely small-c conservative, very orthodox, there's no experimentation or zaniness with human bodies. The system, and frankly the work (years of total work, oversight, convention) keeps them in the mould. And frankly, they have no reason to try to go outside it either, once inside the mould, it's just too lucrative to leave.
The same thing comes up whenever we talk about splitting states or cities/towns in the US. Some people are like "why would you want that, it's not in your economic interest" and the people who want whatever the split is to happen reply "we'd rather be poor and in control of ourselves"
Germany in the EU with open migration may possibly present an existential challenge to the nature of what Germany is in the long term. Some people don't care, some people want that, some are against it.
Whereas making SF Bay area '1 city' would be a matter of pragmatism, not much more.
Also - there's actually scant evidence that federalization is better for everyone in the long run, it depends a lot on many things. I actually believe the EEC with slightly better rules for movement would be fundamentally better than the EU - even in raw economic terms. But that Bay Area - with the right leadership - would be better off.
If support for the war was lower among the less education, does this mean the less educated do not think as independently?
What they seem to lack (what most people I meet seem to lack) is questions and a questioning mind.
(Added later...) I don’t know what you’re studying. And I know philosophy and fine arts programs get shat on sometimes, but one thing those subjects allow (when taught properly) is a very, very deep questioning and thoughtfulness towards many things. In my experience, anyway.
I don't do well in university style math classes. It takes me a long time working through something to understand what is happening (and why - the why of a thing is one of the first questions I ask when I'm learning something new).
It takes me about twice as long to learn a math concept as my peers (or so it seems). But I'm typically the first to speak up during a lecture.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. If you're anything like me, you hold yourself to a higher standard when it comes to understanding a concept. A lot of people I know (I'm in second year math) do way better than me on exams but can't even explain some of the basic concepts in the courses, like:
* what is a basis?
* what does it really mean to diagonalize a matrix?
They've mastered the on-paper calculations but haven't put any thought into the deeper meaning of these concepts. When I try to explain they give me an odd look, as if to ask why anyone would care about these things. Are we raising an entire generation of Clever Hanses? [1]
I think the problem with university is that it's become too closely correlated with economic and social status. Or perhaps it's always been that way, though in the past it was not so much a cause of status but an effect.
This was brought home to me when I had to calculate the moment of inertia of some gears in a gearbox. I started with the concept of MoI, and worked it out with a bit of calculus. Another engineer was looking over my work, and asked "what book did you get the formula for MoI out of?" (The shape of the gear was unusual and the book formulae didn't match.)
Anecdotally, I live in the shadow of a Big Ten university, so I know a lot of academics, and I don't think any of them have expressed a "follow the rules" approach that I was able to discern. Likewise for the people I know who are K-12 teachers, private music teachers, and so forth.
Edit: There were some exceptions, such as my double bass lessons.
So the MoI was not simply a stackup of some stock shapes.
It's not that the calculation was particularly difficult, it's just that calculus was needed, and one couldn't just copy the formula for a stock shape.
It was just clear to me that some engineers were formula-pluggers and others learned it at a deeper level.
Stock shapes were certainly handy to check the math with, however. Fit the gear into a stock shape envelope, and have the gear envelope a stock shape. Your calculation should fall in between the results of those shapes.
The purpose of calculating the MoI was to determine if the stops at the end of the screw were strong enough to stop the gearbox without shattering.
That explains it.
Airplane parts are a whole 'nother world. I imagine that rocket parts take that to the nth level, which is one reason that working on rockets is the ultimate for an engineer. A real engineer would pay to work on an F1 engine design <g>.
Maybe take a good literature or philosophy class if your university offers. They won’t help you understand CS (most likely — although some weird parallels can crop up), but they’ll expand your mind. If you let them!
This is actually an excellent habit, and you should nurture it as much as you can. It looks like you have done a careful SWOT analysis, and thats the way to go.
Being a Marxist in business school would be, as would being a libertarian in art school.
From some, I never hear any questions. The others, I hear domain specific questions (how do I do X?), or disambiguation (when you say this, do you mean ...?), or what's on the test, etc.
There are few forward looking questions (what can I use this for? where is it used? what is the state of the art?).
Mine opened me to a variety of specialties, opinions, skills, cultural movements that I had never seen before.
This was my first contact with unions, entrepreneurs, metalheads, gay community, ultra-christians, drug users, researchers.
There are a lot of bad framings, and "all conservatives think slavery is ok" is a terrible one
Slavery is completely anti-ethical to libertarianism.
Taking everything, including choice, (in essence slavery) could be called a 'tax' using the above definition.
To compare taxes (as they are presently levied against any first world population) to slavery is quite a stretch, though.