I studied a bit of programming in other degrees but am mostly self taught.

I have a masters in financial economics and another in business.

> Speaking of the tech industry, autodidacts are bootcampers are not mutually exclusive with university graduates.

Definitely true, but it's largely semantics at this point, the original discussion was regarding the notion that university prepares those who attend to fight fascism by being immune to propaganda or disinformation.

> what exactly is your experience in discussion with university graduates exclusively, that you can compare it with Hacker News discussion?

This will be a controversial point because I will be accused of having "a side" (because this is the world we have become now it seems). However what I have witnessed and interacted with is that students largely convert to the university prevailing ideology and will follow it as dogma. This can be for social pressure reasons, or I would venture that it could even be part of how the environment has to be for undergrads (IE: ingestion techniques largely focus on regurgitation, not innovation or deep thought, only surface level if anything). Thus when people I interact with talk to me, they can hold opposing ideas in their head simultaniously without being able to reason about why they hold that belief.

For an extremely prescient example, Swedish university students will march for Palestine against Israel using flags made in China (where there is a huge active genoice against the Uyghur Muslim population). Additionally they will loudly support Palestine while simultaneously supporting gay and trans rights- which is clearly a huge conflict. Sweden as a country itself is already pro-Palestine, being one of the first countries to be so (first country in Europe to recognise it as a state for example). Similarly the issues of Feminism have come to Sweden, when Sweden does the most (by far) to promote equality of gender, womens rights and the right to bodily autonomy -- but when questioned on what rights they will be unable to come up with anything other than really high level buzzwords like Patriarchy, the plight of the Swedish Feminist typically lives on the subjugation of women in other countries (as a fallback).

It's ok to have these beliefs, of course it is, so please don't misunderstand me. It just becomes clear when discussing things that people who espouse these views from university and believe in them fervently (to the point where they cannot even engage in conversation without thinking that you are a Nazi or a Misogynist or a Zionist or some "other" group label) -- clearly have only surface level knowledge of the issue. It's pure ignorance and profound belief that propels the thought because of this they can't reason it or think critically about it, so they immediately reject a conversation. If they are forced into a conversation they become quickly defensive and frustrated as they lack the base understanding of the issue so they can't reason nuance or reason why situations might be different between seemingly similar issues.

Similarly those who study economics can only think of the world as money generating and revenue and begin to lack basic empathy of the human condition. -- It's like they've had critical thinking and nuance stripped. (this is a huge generalisation of course).

> I suspect that my esteem for HN discussion is a lot lower than yours.

Probably not, I also don't regard HN discussion as the highest form of conversation, but it's far-and-away from the worst. University students are not equal, many many university students have just figured out that they need to regurgitate what they hear to get by: and they do so, without understanding deeply or thinking critically.

> the original discussion was regarding the notion that university prepares those who attend to fight fascism by being immune to propaganda or disinformation.

I'm neither defending nor disputing that notion. I'm just questioning the assumption that HN commenters are more enlightened as a group than university graduates.

> what I have witnessed and interacted with

Those are two different things. Passively watching the news, for example, doesn't count as having a discussion with university graduates; not to mention that the news isn't a representative sample. I was asking about your experience with discussions. And it feels like you're cherry-picking very specific issues, when of course university graduates have discussions about an extremely wide variety of issues, just as Hacker News commenters do.

> students largely convert to the university prevailing ideology and will follow it as dogma

What exactly do you think is the university prevailing ideology? Note that university administrators have mostly been vehemently, sometimes violently opposed to student protesters. In any case, nobody arrives at university as a blank slate. Students bring their preexisting views with them. Moreover, the student population is hardly uniform. You'll always find a significant number of conservative Christian students, for example, at any large university in the US. Somehow they escaped indoctrination (at university).

> Similarly those who study economics can only think of the world as money generating and revenue and begin to lack basic empathy of the human condition. -- It's like they've had critical thinking and nuance stripped. (this is a huge generalisation of course).

This is a huge stereotype of course. But you also have to ask yourself which students are attracted to the study of economics in the first place. Your major and coursework is mostly voluntarily chosen at college, which raises more questions about the "indoctrination" theory in general.