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I think Marvin Minsky was the first person that I saw take a stand against "knowing yourself" Minsky himself struggled with Freud, wanted to reject Freud, yet

I think Marvin Minsky was the first person that I saw take a stand against "knowing yourself" Minsky himself struggled with Freud, wanted to reject Freud, yet found he couldn't do so entirely. With a little more insight than Andreesen he traced "pathological self-knowing" to Eastern roots including meditation practice. What everybody gets wrong about Andreesen is that Andreesen's origin story of being radicalized through business falls flat: his business partner is the son of notorious conservative pugilist David Horowitz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Horowitz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Horowitz and I find it impossible to believe that he didn't get a big dose of ideology from that source.

sitkack 7mo ago
Fitting that he was such a good friend of Epstein.
hnhg 7mo ago
Minsky, the noted Epstein associate, accused of sex with minors according to court documents, didn’t really care for self examination? Yeah that tracks.
smitty1e 7mo ago
> notorious conservative pugilist David Horowitz "From 1956 to 1975, Horowitz was an outspoken adherent of the New Left. He later rejected progressive ideas and became a defender of neoconservatism. Horowitz recounted his ideological journey in a series of retrospective books, culminating with his 1996 memoir Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Horowitz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Horowitz
- ch4s3 7mo ago
  Yeah, that's basically all of the original Neo-Conservatives. Many of them started out as Trotskyites, like Irving Kristol, James Burnham, Sidney Hook, and others. Arguably Bayard Rustin had a similar trajectory.
- api 7mo ago
  The New Left / Marxist to neocon or hard right pipeline is a thing. A bunch of the Bush-era neocons were former Marxists. There's a few notable present-day neoreactionaries and other hard-right types that were former Marxists. Backing up a bit, I've long observed that a decent number of highly educated and intelligent folks tend to gravitate toward authoritarian politics. That's because, being smart and educated, they obviously know how everything should work and can centrally plan society with their superior intellect. Obviously. Marxism/Leninism delivers that. So does hard-right nationalism and neoreactionary ideology. It's not a big jump. Basically it's a jump you make when you're either tired of losing (Marxism is not popular in the West) or you abandon nominal egalitarianism. I said nominal egalitarianism because all authoritarian systems and political ideologies are inherently elitist. All authoritarian ideologies disregard the opinions of "lesser" people, who either don't matter (right-wing) or aren't smart enough to know what's good for them (left-wing). I think this is the real basis of the "horseshoe theory." The horseshoe meets at the extremes because the extremes of the left/right axis are authoritarian and they have that in common. If you end up at one of those poles you've already decided you know better than most people and this gives a kind of "divine right" to boss them around. For the left it's "smart man's burden" and for the right it's "divine right of kings" type stuff.
  - deaux 7mo ago
    > Backing up a bit, I've long observed that a decent number of highly educated and intelligent folks tend to gravitate toward authoritarian politics. That's because, being smart and educated, they obviously know how everything should work. Intelligent yet unwise (otherwise known as stupid) people are the most dangerous combination. The opposite, "wise yet dumb" on the other hand, tend to be fine. For this reason I'm not a fan of the word "intelligent" as it's so meaningless on its own, yet it instantly evokes positive associations.
    - api 7mo ago
      Oh yeah. I've said for years: smart dumb is much worse than dumb dumb. Dumb dumb is just dumb and ineffective. Smart dumb can do real damage.
leecommamichael 7mo ago
That guy isn't a boxer.
ap99 7mo ago
David Horowitz doesn't seem radical at all. His positions as far as I can google in five minutes seem very reasonable. I think you seeing him as radical is more a reflection of how radically left you are.
jasonmp85 7mo ago
[dead]
tolciho 7mo ago
> I think Marvin Minsky was the first person that I saw take a stand against "knowing yourself" Ordinarily M. de Villefort made and returned very few visits. His wife visited for him, and this was the received thing in the world, where the weighty and multifarious occupations of the magistrate were accepted as an excuse for what was really only calculated pride, a manifestation of professed superiority—in fact, the application of the axiom, _Pretend to think well of yourself, and the world will think well of you_, an axiom a hundred times more useful in society nowadays than that of the Greeks, “Know thyself,” a knowledge for which, in our days, we have substituted the less difficult and more advantageous science of _knowing others_. "The Count of Monte Cristo". Alexandre Dumas. 1846.
- tolciho 7mo ago
  And, spoiler alert, Villefort is nouveau riche, Mammon-oriented, and has pretensions of philosophy. Where have I seen that before? He is also the villain of the story.
- curio_Pol_curio 7mo ago
  Did Dumas explore the liminal space between "know thyself" and "know others", also known as "know one another"? Did Villefort's wife or "The Count"'s romantic interests help them patch up their blind spots? One can ofc argue that mutual learning has been the death of many a marriage/family, but I'm more interested in how self-reliance taken to its "rational-agentic-alignment" extreme is a primary obstacle to self-improvement :) That's a framing Minsky didn't take in his Society of Mind.. but I'm not obviously looking forward to a hallucinated sequel Mind of Society
  - curio_Pol_curio 7mo ago
    Update: missed this relevant comment! In the sense of examining both Minsky's or GP's (viz ours) frames. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603333 >"It's difficult to _[think]?/[will]?_ what we feel is wrong" But it's easier for a third party (wife/therapist/LLM) to point out framing errors? As we are collectively doing to Andreessen's and Villefort's in this thread:)

sitkack 7mo ago

Fitting that he was such a good friend of Epstein.

hnhg 7mo ago

Minsky, the noted Epstein associate, accused of sex with minors according to court documents, didn’t really care for self examination? Yeah that tracks.

smitty1e 7mo ago

> notorious conservative pugilist David Horowitz "From 1956 to 1975, Horowitz was an outspoken adherent of the New Left. He later rejected progressive ideas and became a defender of neoconservatism. Horowitz recounted his ideological journey in a series of retrospective books, culminating with his 1996 memoir Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Horowitz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Horowitz

ch4s3 7mo ago
Yeah, that's basically all of the original Neo-Conservatives. Many of them started out as Trotskyites, like Irving Kristol, James Burnham, Sidney Hook, and others. Arguably Bayard Rustin had a similar trajectory.
api 7mo ago
The New Left / Marxist to neocon or hard right pipeline is a thing. A bunch of the Bush-era neocons were former Marxists. There's a few notable present-day neoreactionaries and other hard-right types that were former Marxists. Backing up a bit, I've long observed that a decent number of highly educated and intelligent folks tend to gravitate toward authoritarian politics. That's because, being smart and educated, they obviously know how everything should work and can centrally plan society with their superior intellect. Obviously. Marxism/Leninism delivers that. So does hard-right nationalism and neoreactionary ideology. It's not a big jump. Basically it's a jump you make when you're either tired of losing (Marxism is not popular in the West) or you abandon nominal egalitarianism. I said nominal egalitarianism because all authoritarian systems and political ideologies are inherently elitist. All authoritarian ideologies disregard the opinions of "lesser" people, who either don't matter (right-wing) or aren't smart enough to know what's good for them (left-wing). I think this is the real basis of the "horseshoe theory." The horseshoe meets at the extremes because the extremes of the left/right axis are authoritarian and they have that in common. If you end up at one of those poles you've already decided you know better than most people and this gives a kind of "divine right" to boss them around. For the left it's "smart man's burden" and for the right it's "divine right of kings" type stuff.
- deaux 7mo ago
  > Backing up a bit, I've long observed that a decent number of highly educated and intelligent folks tend to gravitate toward authoritarian politics. That's because, being smart and educated, they obviously know how everything should work. Intelligent yet unwise (otherwise known as stupid) people are the most dangerous combination. The opposite, "wise yet dumb" on the other hand, tend to be fine. For this reason I'm not a fan of the word "intelligent" as it's so meaningless on its own, yet it instantly evokes positive associations.
  - api 7mo ago
    Oh yeah. I've said for years: smart dumb is much worse than dumb dumb. Dumb dumb is just dumb and ineffective. Smart dumb can do real damage.

leecommamichael 7mo ago

That guy isn't a boxer.

ap99 7mo ago

David Horowitz doesn't seem radical at all. His positions as far as I can google in five minutes seem very reasonable. I think you seeing him as radical is more a reflection of how radically left you are.

jasonmp85 7mo ago

[dead]

tolciho 7mo ago

> I think Marvin Minsky was the first person that I saw take a stand against "knowing yourself" Ordinarily M. de Villefort made and returned very few visits. His wife visited for him, and this was the received thing in the world, where the weighty and multifarious occupations of the magistrate were accepted as an excuse for what was really only calculated pride, a manifestation of professed superiority—in fact, the application of the axiom, _Pretend to think well of yourself, and the world will think well of you_, an axiom a hundred times more useful in society nowadays than that of the Greeks, “Know thyself,” a knowledge for which, in our days, we have substituted the less difficult and more advantageous science of _knowing others_. "The Count of Monte Cristo". Alexandre Dumas. 1846.

tolciho 7mo ago
And, spoiler alert, Villefort is nouveau riche, Mammon-oriented, and has pretensions of philosophy. Where have I seen that before? He is also the villain of the story.
curio_Pol_curio 7mo ago
Did Dumas explore the liminal space between "know thyself" and "know others", also known as "know one another"? Did Villefort's wife or "The Count"'s romantic interests help them patch up their blind spots? One can ofc argue that mutual learning has been the death of many a marriage/family, but I'm more interested in how self-reliance taken to its "rational-agentic-alignment" extreme is a primary obstacle to self-improvement :) That's a framing Minsky didn't take in his Society of Mind.. but I'm not obviously looking forward to a hallucinated sequel Mind of Society
- curio_Pol_curio 7mo ago
  Update: missed this relevant comment! In the sense of examining both Minsky's or GP's (viz ours) frames. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603333 >"It's difficult to _[think]?/[will]?_ what we feel is wrong" But it's easier for a third party (wife/therapist/LLM) to point out framing errors? As we are collectively doing to Andreessen's and Villefort's in this thread:)