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I'm confused. When MA talks about "humanities", I feeel like he is only describing "behaviorism" and "behavior psychology", which would be, at the very least,

I'm confused. When MA talks about "humanities", I feeel like he is only describing "behaviorism" and "behavior psychology", which would be, at the very least, intellectually misleading.

HillRat 4y ago
The fact that Andreessen is becoming a humanities autodidact through Burnham (the later arch-conservative Burnham, rather than the Marxist Burnham, I assume) is ... well, it's an interesting choice, I suppose. About the only thing that's stood the test of time as anything more than a curiosity is "The Managerial Revolution," but as socioeconomic analysis Chandler did it later, and better; and as geopolitical theory Mahan did it first, and better. I have a hunch he's going back to "Suicide of the West" and its bloody-minded anti-liberalism (in the "western liberal democracies" sense of "liberal") which Carl Schmidt did first, and better (using that word advisedly). All in all, it's an idiosyncratic self-education that's mired in a very specific far-right midcentury worldview.
- soSadm4n 4y ago
  Marc rides on the coattails of better thinkers and engineers who came before and had less to build on. At this point he’s a contemporary American elite grifter who relies on the small government meme despite being of a generation that benefited from a social safety net. Seeing Gen X tech leaders as great thinkers when they’re riding the wave of the world rebuilding after WW2 is so bizarre to me; none of Marc’s work is fundamental to anything these days. Thousands of others understand these systems at the same level. It’s a LARP, it’s propaganda. It’s taking intentional advantage of quirks in lizard brain biology. He’s smart but he’s not owed fawning deference. I just can’t under people with deferential behavior towards people like him anymore. Not that you putting it out there like that. Just saying; to keep it’s all a rise and fall of biology. The spiraling rambling they put on is a show for people who don’t know better.
  - missedthecue 4y ago
    Marc grew up in the rural Midwest during Reagan's 1980s. Not sure what you mean that he's some great beneficiary of direct social welfare.
    - soSadm4n 4y ago
    - danans 4y ago
      In what way did growing up in the rural Midwest in the 80s mean Andreesen didn't benefit from social welfare? Public schools and universities like his alma mater UIUC are a pretty clear example of social welfare heavily subsidized by taxpayers, especially in the 80s when you could attend an elite public university for a very low price, and have little to no student debt. Food stamps and SSI aren't the only forms of public assistance.
      - MrMan 4y ago
      - gnicholas 4y ago
        When I hear "social safety net" I don't think of public schools and universities. Perhaps other people have a different definition, but as someone who has studied tax policy (at a public law school!) this was never how we talked about safety nets.
        danans 4y ago
        > When I hear "social safety net" I don't think of public schools and universities. The comment I responded to said social welfare, not social safety net. But personally I consider them not so different since education is a basic need like housing and food. But since middle and higher income people rely on the education subsidy, we don't like to use the same descriptors for it that we use for food and housing subsidies.
      - 4y ago
- thundergolfer 4y ago
  You seem to know this area well. How did you learn about it, and do you listen to Know Your Enemy? I learnt about all those people from Know Your Enemy.
- paganel 4y ago
  He also mentions Keynes shortly after that, I wouldn't call him a far-right follower just for being interested in that midcentury time-frame. He does make a very good point when he talks about Keynes being relatively easy to read when it comes to economics, I mean, compared to the economics of today which has been turned into basically maths. Also, him being from Wisconsin and mentioning Burnham, is strange that he hasn't make at least a passing reference to George Kennan. I'm reading through Gaddis's biography of him and you can sort of see, if you look close enough, the "boy from Wisconsin who has made it to the outside world"-thingie all throughout his (Kennan's) career, even when he was residing in Moscow and when he was trying to understand how the Russians/Soviets basically think and act. It is my opinion that that outside view (meaning a view not centered on the US West Coast nor on the East Coast) is what made some of his dispatches so on point and, basically, so good and informative. I wonder if that also applies to people like MA, I mean, to people who get out of places like Wisconsin and who then reach the West Coast of today. Do they still have that "outside view"?
  - davidgerard 4y ago
    > I wouldn't call him a far-right follower he's been getting into Moldbug, so uh
tannhaeuser 4y ago
Honestly, I'm not entirely sure what humanities stands for in the US (or UK, AUS, SA, ...) education context, if it has even a fixed meaning over time. Like the (Humbold-esque?) categorization of Naturwisschenschaften vs Geisteswissenschaften in my country/language, it seems to be partly used for dissing the humanities, but Reine Wissenschaften (where you're getting a degree in philosophy when studying maths) seems absent? I found it telling when the interview was touching Florence and The Medici, that renaissance humanism (with its all-important aspect of rediscovering, republishing, and preserving antique text material) wasn't connected to the humanities topic. Maybe it was more of a Venice thing, but I saw it as a lost opportunity to learn more of Andreessen's opinion on preservation of our digital heritage (or lack thereof) seeing as he developed Netscape from Mosaic etc.
- jfengel 4y ago
  The terminology is vaguely defined. In the mouth of a techie, I'd assume they mean "everything that gets studied but isn't STEM or business", with a connotation "and is therefore easy since it doesn't have a rigorous grading system". There are links between Renaissance humanism and what is now called "humanities". The Humanists weren't just about the re-naissance of Greek and Roman works, but also about creating new ones. A lot of humanists were poets, painters, and writers -- fields often lumped in with "humanities". There was also a rebirth of what the Greeks called philosophy, which also included subjects that we'd call sociology (laws, ethics, forms of government, etc.) Sociology is also treated as adjacent to humanities. Techies do need to learn that the easily-measurable aspects of a technology are not the only important ones. We use tech because it appeals to us as humans, using the yardstick of our perceptions of things. Humanities are easily dissed because they're hard to measure objectively, but that doesn't mean they're unimportant. Indeed, they may be more important precisely because we haven't (yet) learned them well enough to be simple.
  - 2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
    I wouldn’t call humanities easy. I did very poorly at them. I don’t dislike humanities, but if your grading system is going to be a bit subjective, I’d prefer not to be graded at all or at least just a pass/fail.

I'm confused. When MA talks about "humanities", I feeel like he is only describing "behaviorism" and "behavior psychology", which would be, at the very least, intellectually misleading.

HillRat 4y ago

The fact that Andreessen is becoming a humanities autodidact through Burnham (the later arch-conservative Burnham, rather than the Marxist Burnham, I assume) is ... well, it's an interesting choice, I suppose. About the only thing that's stood the test of time as anything more than a curiosity is "The Managerial Revolution," but as socioeconomic analysis Chandler did it later, and better; and as geopolitical theory Mahan did it first, and better. I have a hunch he's going back to "Suicide of the West" and its bloody-minded anti-liberalism (in the "western liberal democracies" sense of "liberal") which Carl Schmidt did first, and better (using that word advisedly). All in all, it's an idiosyncratic self-education that's mired in a very specific far-right midcentury worldview.

soSadm4n 4y ago
Marc rides on the coattails of better thinkers and engineers who came before and had less to build on. At this point he’s a contemporary American elite grifter who relies on the small government meme despite being of a generation that benefited from a social safety net. Seeing Gen X tech leaders as great thinkers when they’re riding the wave of the world rebuilding after WW2 is so bizarre to me; none of Marc’s work is fundamental to anything these days. Thousands of others understand these systems at the same level. It’s a LARP, it’s propaganda. It’s taking intentional advantage of quirks in lizard brain biology. He’s smart but he’s not owed fawning deference. I just can’t under people with deferential behavior towards people like him anymore. Not that you putting it out there like that. Just saying; to keep it’s all a rise and fall of biology. The spiraling rambling they put on is a show for people who don’t know better.
- missedthecue 4y ago
  Marc grew up in the rural Midwest during Reagan's 1980s. Not sure what you mean that he's some great beneficiary of direct social welfare.
  - soSadm4n 4y ago
  - danans 4y ago
    In what way did growing up in the rural Midwest in the 80s mean Andreesen didn't benefit from social welfare? Public schools and universities like his alma mater UIUC are a pretty clear example of social welfare heavily subsidized by taxpayers, especially in the 80s when you could attend an elite public university for a very low price, and have little to no student debt. Food stamps and SSI aren't the only forms of public assistance.
    - MrMan 4y ago
    - gnicholas 4y ago
      When I hear "social safety net" I don't think of public schools and universities. Perhaps other people have a different definition, but as someone who has studied tax policy (at a public law school!) this was never how we talked about safety nets.
      - danans 4y ago
        > When I hear "social safety net" I don't think of public schools and universities. The comment I responded to said social welfare, not social safety net. But personally I consider them not so different since education is a basic need like housing and food. But since middle and higher income people rely on the education subsidy, we don't like to use the same descriptors for it that we use for food and housing subsidies.
    - 4y ago
thundergolfer 4y ago
You seem to know this area well. How did you learn about it, and do you listen to Know Your Enemy? I learnt about all those people from Know Your Enemy.
paganel 4y ago
He also mentions Keynes shortly after that, I wouldn't call him a far-right follower just for being interested in that midcentury time-frame. He does make a very good point when he talks about Keynes being relatively easy to read when it comes to economics, I mean, compared to the economics of today which has been turned into basically maths. Also, him being from Wisconsin and mentioning Burnham, is strange that he hasn't make at least a passing reference to George Kennan. I'm reading through Gaddis's biography of him and you can sort of see, if you look close enough, the "boy from Wisconsin who has made it to the outside world"-thingie all throughout his (Kennan's) career, even when he was residing in Moscow and when he was trying to understand how the Russians/Soviets basically think and act. It is my opinion that that outside view (meaning a view not centered on the US West Coast nor on the East Coast) is what made some of his dispatches so on point and, basically, so good and informative. I wonder if that also applies to people like MA, I mean, to people who get out of places like Wisconsin and who then reach the West Coast of today. Do they still have that "outside view"?
- davidgerard 4y ago
  > I wouldn't call him a far-right follower he's been getting into Moldbug, so uh

tannhaeuser 4y ago

Honestly, I'm not entirely sure what humanities stands for in the US (or UK, AUS, SA, ...) education context, if it has even a fixed meaning over time. Like the (Humbold-esque?) categorization of Naturwisschenschaften vs Geisteswissenschaften in my country/language, it seems to be partly used for dissing the humanities, but Reine Wissenschaften (where you're getting a degree in philosophy when studying maths) seems absent? I found it telling when the interview was touching Florence and The Medici, that renaissance humanism (with its all-important aspect of rediscovering, republishing, and preserving antique text material) wasn't connected to the humanities topic. Maybe it was more of a Venice thing, but I saw it as a lost opportunity to learn more of Andreessen's opinion on preservation of our digital heritage (or lack thereof) seeing as he developed Netscape from Mosaic etc.

jfengel 4y ago
The terminology is vaguely defined. In the mouth of a techie, I'd assume they mean "everything that gets studied but isn't STEM or business", with a connotation "and is therefore easy since it doesn't have a rigorous grading system". There are links between Renaissance humanism and what is now called "humanities". The Humanists weren't just about the re-naissance of Greek and Roman works, but also about creating new ones. A lot of humanists were poets, painters, and writers -- fields often lumped in with "humanities". There was also a rebirth of what the Greeks called philosophy, which also included subjects that we'd call sociology (laws, ethics, forms of government, etc.) Sociology is also treated as adjacent to humanities. Techies do need to learn that the easily-measurable aspects of a technology are not the only important ones. We use tech because it appeals to us as humans, using the yardstick of our perceptions of things. Humanities are easily dissed because they're hard to measure objectively, but that doesn't mean they're unimportant. Indeed, they may be more important precisely because we haven't (yet) learned them well enough to be simple.
- 2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
  I wouldn’t call humanities easy. I did very poorly at them. I don’t dislike humanities, but if your grading system is going to be a bit subjective, I’d prefer not to be graded at all or at least just a pass/fail.