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Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection
- seydor 7mo agoTechnologists used to be smart, now they just have money.
- lenerdenator 7mo agoThe problem is that we have made the latter condition an alias for the former. Redefining competence and intelligence as "ability to make money" has done untold damage to American society.
- Sl1mb0 7mo agoI have a personal belief that this is a result of the "can-do" attitude that pervades not only American society currently; but virtually all of American history. A small group of colonies managed to win a war against what was considered at one point the globe's strongest empire. Throughout the history-narrative of America there is a prevailing sense that the underdog can always overcome their circumstances and win the day. That most Americans (myself included) have a semi-deluded sense they "can achieve anything they put their minds to" is a direct manifestation of that narrative-history. It's also why there is so much rampant anti-intellectualism here; think about it, if you can do and are capable of anything - why would you *ever* listen to an expert's opinion? It's also why libertarian-ism is so popular; why would you want the rest of society dragging you down when you yourself are capable of so much more? I want to be clear as well, there *are* benefits to the can-do attitude, but at this point the cons outweigh the pros, and we are seeing that play out in American society. I'd also like to acknowledge that the current situation is the result of many different factors; but that this one is largely overlooked due to the assumption that it's positives outweigh it's negatives.
- a456463 7mo agoWell, yes and no. A can do attitude is needed to imagine taking over fighting a global British empire. All around the world people needed to muster up that courage. That said, equating the outcome of that with smartness was bound to happen. That said, they leadership got co-opted by money outcomes is where the downfall happened, IMO
- hencq 7mo agoI think there's something to this. And while America has always had this can-do attitude (just look at the number of self help books), it does seem to be in another gear recently. I don't know what caused it, but I think there have been a number of indicators: Trump ignoring Congress and introducing wild tariffs, Musk firing half of Twitter's staff and then later repeating this with DOGE, the quick roll-out of LLMs. There seems to be this prevailing attitude of "we can just do stuff, damn the consequences". It appears to come with a lot of corruption and anti-intellectualism. Like you say there are also benefits to this. I think the break through of mRNA vaccines was an early indicator. I just hope we can steer this attitude back to a more optimistic world-view instead of the blatant self serving one that is currently prevailing.
- bluecheese452 7mo agoPolitical elites in a vast colony far from the empire’s center gambled that the empire did not have the will to grind out an expensive victory against fellow elites. This proved to be correct.
- mlinhares 7mo agoAnd the people that fawn all over every single word they say think they'll eventually have the same money as well. But in the end they'll just be dumber.
- xhkkffbf 7mo ago[flagged]
- sd9 7mo agoIsn't this whole comment section about engaging with the material itself and disagreeing with it? I don't see anybody here saying that Andreessen's ideas are bad specifically because he has money, they are saying the ideas he has are bad and he has money and that's probably letting him get away with broadcasting terrible ideas.
- andsoitis 7mo ago> Technologists used to be smart but were they, as a whole, ever wise?
- duped 7mo agoVenture capitalists have never been smart and have always had money
- moomoo11 7mo agoImagine taking advice from VC instead of their money.
- siva7 7mo agoWell, isn't this the whole point of YC?
- a456463 7mo agoWhat does this uneducated greedy clown know about anything? He just happened to be born in 1955 US in a time of money. Meditation was around way before Freud in eastern cultures. For once. Other cultures around the world had similar things about introspection. Just because his greedy ass doesn't want to face his own demons, he frames it as we don't need it
- dboreham 7mo agoHe's not that old.
- laserlight 7mo agoHe was born in 1971 according to Wikipedia [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen
- pier25 7mo agoOf course he is. In fact in that same podcast Andreessen makes a point using historical evidence and what is history but collective introspection? I do agree that too much introspection can be negative and that it's hard or even impossible to understand your decisions and motives until some time has passed.
- Reddit_MLP2 7mo agoLet me fix that for you. Marc Andreessen is wrong. There is the whole broken clock analogy though...
- kendalf89 7mo agoIt's a shame, anyone who's dumb enough to believe Marc Andreessen, isn't going to be smart enough to read this article.
- leetvibecoder 7mo ago> Marc Andreessen was right about web browsers. > But he has since been wrong about a great many things. This is true for almost all of the tech bros / influencers / CEOs. Being right once and getting rich does not make them smarter or better than anyone. Unfortunately our society doesn‘t view it that way - hence here we are, stuck with the Elons and Thiels of the world. And it‘s hurting us yet they’re on a pedestal
- John23832 7mo agoWe all know he’s wrong. The problem isn’t that he is wrong, it’s that we have elevated the wealthy into a status where they can be wrong, have no correction, and make decisions whole clothe which negatively affect the rest of us. All while being insulated from their negative world view.
- a456463 7mo agoYes. I mean calling them out and people take personal offense as if they are receiving handouts from them or they are that rich. They don't give a damn about anyone or anything for that matter
- tcbawo 7mo agoWe now live in a courtier world where flattery and politics determine successful outcomes.
- quantummagic 7mo agoYes we do. We always did, and we still do.
- Arubis 7mo agoThat has been the case for a vast swathe of time across history. It hurts because we had a nice couple of decades where it seemed that, not only was this not the case, but that we were directionally accelerating away from it.
- gassi 7mo agoI've taken the position that anything the ultra-wealthy say is likely wrong, and every decision they take will negatively affect society, unless and until its corroborated by an unbiased source with expertise in the subject matter.
- threetonesun 7mo agoThis is an SNL skit from 1996 that has always been my framing for how many-million/billionaires think, Tiny Camels through Giant Needles: https://www.reddit.com/r/RebelChristianity/comments/113xslu/billionaire_shrinks_camels_so_theyll_fit_through/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RebelChristianity/comments/113xslu/...
- kergonath 7mo agoTo be fair, Marc Andreessen is wrong about many things.
- josefritzishere 7mo agoThis notion that CEOs are geniuses is just patently false. They are average, and mostly distinguish themselves only in their arrogance and avarice. I would bet the IQ of the average HN reader to be higher than the average C-Suite exec.
- daveguy 7mo agoApparently Andreessen is an ignorant fool. Seems par for the course with these tech oligarch asshats. Only at least since the ancient Greeks has introspection been relevant (and even the Renaissance was well established 400 years ago in the 1600s): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_unexamined_life_is_not_worth_living https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_unexamined_life_is_not_wor... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_thyself https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_thyself
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- functional_dev 7mo agoI didn't know how old this actually is. I was surprised to learn Marcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations as a private journal... never meant to be published. found this if anyone wants to explore: https://vectree.io/c/stoic-self-examination-marcus-aurelius-seneca-and-inner-life https://vectree.io/c/stoic-self-examination-marcus-aurelius-...
- willio58 7mo ago> Marc Andreessen was right about web browsers. >But he has since been wrong about a great many things. Basically summarizes any billionaire. Society still seems to drink the kool-aid of billionaires. People think a guy has a billion dollars because he’s a genius. In all cases it was some small amount of intelligence with a whole lot of luck. My hope is in the decades to come we wake up to the fact these guys are lucky wealth-hoarders and they get too much time on every podcast you can think of.
- an0malous 7mo agoHe’s right in that business success is largely correlated with sociopathy, it helps you focus on the goal of maximizing your own wealth without worrying about the messy details of how other human beings are affected. Going back four hundred years, it would have never occurred to anyone that humans shouldn’t be slaves or that the environment will be irrecoverably destroyed if everyone pillages it for their own business needs.
- ceejayoz 7mo ago> Going back four hundred years, it would have never occurred to anyone that humans shouldn’t be slaves… Philosophers considered that even before Christ. https://www.cnbc.com/2011/06/03/the-ancient-and-noble-greek-tradition-of-debt-repudiation.html https://www.cnbc.com/2011/06/03/the-ancient-and-noble-greek-... "A fragment of Solon’s poetry describes a situation in which many of the poor “have arrived in foreign lands/sold into slavery, bound in shameful fetters.”" "In 594 BC, Solon was appointed archon of Athens. His solution to his city’s strife was to cancel both public and private debts and end debt slavery." > or that the environment will be irrecoverably destroyed if everyone pillages it for their own business needs https://theconversation.com/the-waters-become-corrupt-the-air-infected-heres-how-ancient-greeks-and-romans-grappled-with-environmental-damage-236680 https://theconversation.com/the-waters-become-corrupt-the-ai... Pliny the Elder: "We taint the rivers and the elements of nature, and the air itself, which is the main support of life, we turn into a medium for the destruction of life." (The same is true for introspection. It's certainly not a modern invention. Andreessen asserts it's an 1800s/1900s invention, but Shakespeare's fucking famous for "to be or not to be, that is the question"!)
- an0malous 7mo agoAndreesen and I are both talking about trends, not that literally no one thought of introspection or the immorality of slavery four hundred years ago
- ceejayoz 7mo agoAndreesen: “If you go back, like, 400 years ago, it never would have occurred to anybody to be introspective." You: "it would have never occurred to anyone that humans shouldn’t be slaves" Come on. Words have meaning.
- arthurjj 7mo ago>The only access anyone has to those questions is through something like introspection: either their own, or someone else’s honest reports of their experience, or the accumulated testimony of literature and philosophy... I'm broadly sympathetic to the point in this article but it's trying to slip in literature and philosophy with honest first hand reports of introspection is underhanded. There's no reason to expect them to be any less guilty of motivated reasoning than Marc Andreesen
- general_reveal 7mo agoThe problem with certain intellectual pursuits is that it becomes its own little sub culture with its own little sub culture celebrities. You see, High School never ended. Things can still get lame in the “real world”. The “geeks” need to shut up and go back to the geek table and be more humble. The whole lot of us have demonstrated limited ability on how to be decent. To quote Rick James: ”They should have never given you developers money. Fuck your Ping Pong table, fuck. Your. Ping. Pong. Table!”
- cindyllm 7mo ago[dead]
- delichon 7mo agoFor me too much deep introspection does lead to depression. I am fully capable of diving into my navel, and it turns out to be a deep dark pit. Doing anything productive, or even just fun, is a cure for me. I often read the news, feel miserable about the state of the world, and then go outside and do yardwork, get my body in motion, and very soon feel much better about the world and my place in it. For me introspection isn't bad in itself, but binging on it is, as with food.
- ceejayoz 7mo agoI mean, being aware of that (and adjusting behavior for it) is a form of introspection. Without introspection you'd just dive into the pit.
- Sl1mb0 7mo agoOr worse, you wouldn't even know about it!
- ma2kx 7mo agoI think this conclusion in itself is more introspection than reading the news. After all most news events are external and whether you read about them or not doesn't make any difference. Its really more the opposite of introspection.
- biophysboy 7mo agoIntrospection is not doomscrolling though. Being tugged around by short-lived stimuli from a feed is the opposite of deep self-reflection. In order to go from reading the news to going outside and doing yardwork, you need to have a thought along the lines of "this doesn't feel good - I should do something else". That is introspection.
- jjulius 7mo ago> I often read the news, feel miserable about the state of the world... This isn't introspection.
- sibeliuss 7mo agoHis statements about this were purely politics, and nothing more. He himself does not believe this. It's political revisionism.
- a456463 7mo agoI agree he could be doing political revisionism. But I fail to grasp, why?
- sibeliuss 7mo agoTo appear as a strongman in the eyes of those in power, those who are clearly incapable of introspection. And by such moves he himself gains power.
- NoGravitas 7mo agoYes, precisely. That's also why his argument includes Freud - as a Judeo-bolshivism dogwhistle.
- wodenokoto 7mo agoIs the 1 percenters getting dumber or acting like it? Like 10 years ago, I felt like Andreesen and Elon were thought leaders. Now they sound like idiots. Did I or did they change? Did I grow up and they changed to a younger audience and what I used to enjoy was just a different kind of stupid?
- artyom 7mo agoA little bit of both? I don't think they were thought leaders but they were often correct and also at the right point in time. Also, power corrupts. That's a tale as old as time, I have found no evidence that somehow tech-bros are immune to it.
- newyankee 7mo agoThe way I suspect they think is this. A pyramid is always going to be there, it is better we reinforce and consolidate our power at top with the friendlies below and make it sound like that is the best option for everyone.
- lijok 7mo agoThey changed. You wouldn’t believe it but those most impacted by the mental rot that social media can induce - are the ultra wealthy.
- croes 7mo agoI doubt that. The only thing social media removed was scruples and shame. People were ashamed to say such dumb things and now they think they have some kind of deeper knowledge. Their thinking didn’t change.
- monknomo 7mo agoI think they also suddenly had to deal with a bunch of people being mean to them, and telling them they were wrong, which drove them a little mad. Sort of an oppositional defiant thing, filtered through immense wealth and power
- TrackerFF 7mo agoI'm curious how Andreessen came to this motto. Introspection is just a feedback loop, where you evaluate your actions, and adjust for when going forward. Not too unlike a control loop. Maybe the current AI landscape is a symptom of that mentality - that everyone should just pour as much money and resources into it, never look back, never measure, just keep pushing forward. If you start asking questions, you're in doubt. If you're in doubt, you're a roadblock for progression.
- keiferski 7mo agoThis whole scenario is just the logical conclusion of American anti-intellectualism. The need for intellectuals doesn't really go away, but rather we start assuming that "good at making money" = "has ideas worth listening to, on any topic." Not really surprising that many of these people are also frequent critics of academia and professors.
- the_sleaze_ 7mo ago> as ideas worth listening to, on any topic. Shoe Button Complex as coined by Buffet and Munger. I see this all the time from even mildly successful people. Suddenly the Early Bitcoin Adopter is now a Macro Economist and a Relationship Guru.
- roncesvalles 7mo agoAlso a product of the US stock market going up and to the right for the last couple of decades. It's very easy to convince yourself that you are some great perceptor of the world because you've been getting 30% CAGR on your portfolio for the last few many years. But in hindsight it was always more likely to be green than red, and you could handily beat the market average if you had any kind of tech tilt at all, which many of these people naturally did. This applies to private equity too. I think a lot of mediocre tech VCs ended up with green books because the tide was just rising so fast; if you invested in any Stanford/Berkeley/MIT person who walked through your doors, it was impossible to end up in the red.
- crhulls 7mo agoI very much agree with your first paragraph. But then to say you could just simply invest in "in any Stanford/Berkeley/MIT person who walked through your doors, it was impossible to end up in the red." is the kind of non-reflective and overly simplistic thinking you are criticizing. Being a good investor takes skill. The vast majority of people who come from these schools couldn't get funded, and most still fail. The majority of investors even in this boom also failed. My meta point is that we seem to be losing nuance on both sides, and that is coming through on many of the messages here.
- supliminal 7mo agoI guess even HN needs two minutes of hate. Andreessen is an easy target.
- zug_zug 7mo agoCounterpoint -- Yes he's wrong and obviously so. But is some rich dude saying something stupid worthy of platforming? It almost feels to me like acting as though a famous person being gasp wrong about something is implicitly suggesting that this is somehow surprising? We should be surprised and write essays when the smartest people we know say something silly. Just because somebody's bank account has some zeroes in it doesn't mean it should be worthy of our focus.
- BugsJustFindMe 7mo ago> But is some rich dude saying something stupid worthy of platforming? The rich dude saying the stupid thing was platformed. This is defense.
- throwatdem12311 7mo agoThese people have profoundly inflated egos, platforming them if only for the express purpose of mocking them mercilessly in front of the entire world is absolutely worth it.
- foobiekr 7mo agoThese people are insanely powerful forces in the modern world. Of course we should talk about them (and usually how Wrong, shortsighted, and self-serving they are).
- a456463 7mo agoYes. They need to be platforms and shamed to hell. Otherwise they thrive in shadows like the ghouls they are.
- salthearth 7mo agoMark Andreessen is an idiot, a guy fooled by randomness.
- bluegatty 7mo agoIgnore all the techno bros on everything but their field of expertise. It's not like they don't have a right to an opinion, but it's usually outsized, aggrandized nonsense. Rare Book + Ego + a few thoughts on a long walk = Insufferable Twitter Nonsense
- salthearth 7mo agoMark Andreessen is the manifstation of "fooled by randomness". An idiot that got lucky, now thinks he is a god.
- cloche 7mo agoI've worked with a couple people who got rich during dot-com era. They had the same "I'm right about everything" vibe.
- Voultapher 7mo agoEvery time I hear his name I have to think of "America needs to build more" but just not in my backyard. > “I am writing this letter to communicate our IMMENSE objection to the creation of multifamily overlay zones in Atherton,” the two wrote in their email, signed by both, as reported by The Atlantic’s Jerusalem Demsas. “Please IMMEDIATELY REMOVE all multifamily overlay zoning projects from the Housing Element which will be submitted to the state in July. They will MASSIVELY decrease our home values, the quality of life of ourselves and our neighbors and IMMENSELY increase the noise pollution and traffic.” [0] Pointing out hypocrisy is easy and not necessarily damning. But looking at all the -100 for everyone but +2 for me fabric of society abusing startups he funds I can't help but think he is a pretty whack person. Let's stop listening to him. [0] https://fortune.com/2022/08/06/marc-andreessen-billionaire-nimby-yimby-its-time-to-build/ https://fortune.com/2022/08/06/marc-andreessen-billionaire-n...
- DonHopkins 7mo agoNot to put too fine a point on it, but if my head were shaped that way, I wouldn't want to look inside it either.
- minkzilla 7mo agoCertainly not the earliest example and can be interpreted in many ways but one of my favorite ancient examples of “introspection” is the phrase “Know Thyself” inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_thyself https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_thyself
- siva7 7mo ago> Host David Senra, apparently delighted, congratulated Andreessen on developing what he called a "zero-introspection mindset." It's easy to have a zero-introspection mindset if the consequences of having zero introspection are absorbed by the many zeroes on Andreessen's bank account.
- saltyoldman 7mo agoIt's nearly the same concept of move fast and break things... what happened to this forum.
- pkilgore 7mo agoAndreessen is a virus ("Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Marc Andreessen") and has a virus' motivations: grow without thinking -- maybe the host dies, maybe it doesn't, but just grow.
- croes 7mo ago400 years ago black people and women weren’t considered equal to white men. So congratulations, you are a fool
- croes 7mo agoAre the downvoters Andreesen fans or did they miss by reference to > Appearing on the Founders podcast this week, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen made the rather extraordinary claim that - going back four hundred years - it would never have occurred to anyone to be “introspective.”
- jjulius 7mo ago“It tires me to talk to rich men. You expect a man of millions, the head of a great industry, to be a man worth hearing; but as a rule they don't know anything outside their own business.” - Teddy Roosevelt
- tombert 7mo agoOften I'm not even entirely convinced they know a lot about their own business either. It seems like the ones who make the cartoonishly large amounts of money are the ones who got lucky to hire decent people early on.
- InsideOutSanta 7mo agoHow does Marc Andreessen know that he has no introspection if the doesn't have introspection to evaluate whether he has introspection? How can he discuss his lack of introspection in a whole-ass interview about his lack of introspection if he lacks the introspection to evaluate his lack of introspection?
- zozbot234 7mo agoYou're absolutely right! His sentence about not really needing introspection and the right approach being "Move forward. Go." should be read as the Zen koan it is and carefully introspected on. This is the secret of enlightenment. True enlightenment is no-mind: it's not just zero introspection, it's zero of every dualistic craving. Pure action, without anyone being "there" to act: it's about walking the path, not just sitting and reflecting on it.
- sesm 7mo agoDoes it include zero of money? Edit: the comment above said 'zero of everything', but it was edited.
- netsharc 7mo agoIs this AI slop? In any case I hate writing that is "subject predicate object" that makes the whole article feel as obnoxious like a Twitter thread. Write better sentences, please!
- Arubis 7mo agoMarc Andreessen has been too wealthy for too long, and has lost perspective. Billionaires are modern day monarchs, divorced from the experience of hoi polloi. I don’t say this (in this present moment) out of simple complaint or sloganeering, though both are easily applied. The argument I’m making is that gaining and/or living with sufficiently ludicrous wealth—orders of magnitude beyond what most of us plebs would retire on—leads _inextricably_ to living a life that is so utterly different that people lose completely the understanding of what the majority of the population actually does with their days. It almost doesn’t matter if the person who gains this level of wealth was “good” or “bad” or whatever qualifier you want to apply. This isn’t a new or a fresh take. It’s a tale as old as…well, I’m comparing to monarchy. But it bears restating, because the folks that are empowered to make sweeping changes to the systems that we all live under cannot actually relate to what most of those changes feel like. This is less of an individual moral failing than a structural one—though when the structure is being driven by the selfsame individuals, I guess there’s plenty of blame to go around. It isn’t so surprising that someone raised with generational wealth would have such blinders—and in fact I find that fairly forgivable on the individual basis, though damning of the system that allows that to happen while there’s still people unhoused and unfed. Perhaps more surprising (and maybe serving as a warning to the rest of us) is that it’s visibly possible to have and to then lose that perspective and ability to relate. This is most visible with folks whose public work precedes their extreme wealth. Jerry Seinfeld still writes comedy—but it doesn’t hit like his earlier works, since there isn’t a shared reality. Our own Paul Graham’s earlier essays have aged, but a fair number of them still ring true; his more recent works barely make a blip here, and with reason. Marc Andreessen might be right for himself. Or he might be dead wrong. But his advice and writings are effectively useless to the rest of us either way. There’s no shared “there” there.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- jmyeet 7mo agoWhat we're seeing is the culmination of these three ideas: 1. Prosperity theology [1]. This idea took hold in early Protestantism. Even if you're not religious, it's had an undeniable impact on the West (including the so-called "Protestant work ethic"). The idea is that you are essentially blsssed by God if you are rich. This was a huge departure from Catholic dogma. If Jesus was real and came back in Texas today he'd get hung at a Communist terrorist; 2. The myth of meritocracy. This is a core tenet of capitalism that the wealthy are that way because they deserve to be; and #. In the US in particular, hyper-individualism. Specifically, the destruction of any kinf of collectivism. This shields people from the impacts of their actions and any kind of accountability. People who find success tend to get high on their own supply and they have no one around them to correct their behavior. Instead they have a cadre of slavishly sycophantic yes men. There's a common refrain that it takes three generations to go from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves. The vast majority of fortunes are lost, or at least significantly reduced, within 3 generations because the later generations get surrounded by the same yes men and have no idea what it takes to maintain let alone make a fortune. There's really no hope for any form of introspection, accountability or growth. I'm old enough to remember the Netscape saga. I remember feeling kind of sorry for Marc Andressen who got kinda screwed by the whole netscape deal. By "screwed" I mean he ended up with ~$50M (IIRC) on a deal worth billions. I also remember how the other tech titans of the era were at least ostensibly anti-establishment rebels. "Tech hippies" in a way. I really wonder what those people would think of the likes of Andressen, Musk, Bezos, Ballmer, Gates, Thiel, etc. All those are objectively awful people who kowtow to the American administration and have essentially just become military contractors who uphold awful ideas like "transhumanism" (which is just eugenics). But is he wrong? Our company culture rewards psychopaths and sociopaths because they have no conscience. In a way, there's no accountability without a conscience. So it might be a successful strategy in business but it is objectively making the world a worse place. And that ultimately ends with heads on spikes. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology
- annor 7mo agoThey just gone through a cycle where their wealth collapsse to near zero by external forces outside of their control. In general, the one on the fringe building and gaing traction will rise to take over and so on it goes. Builders will find a way or find an excuse.
- sharadov 7mo agoThe problem is with the media pouring endless attention on these tech bros and bestowing the mantel of expertise in every field on them - philosophy, politics, religion, sociology. So now they spout their mouth off and the media hangs on their every word and debates it.
- codersfocus 7mo agoThere's a balance to be had between introspection and taking action. People tend to have a bias for one or the other (action bias vs thinking bias.) Those who act would do well to think a bit more, and those who think a lot need help taking action. I recently launched an app that can help in either case (Wiseday on the app store.) It lets you print a daily page that can both be used to introspect, as well as an execution aid to help you actually take consistent action towards your goals.
- kartika36363 7mo agocongratulations you are absolutely right, whilst having $0b in your accounts
- pwdisswordfishy 7mo ago> Marc Andreessen was right about web browsers. Actually, what about web browsers was he right about?
- furyofantares 7mo agoThat they'd become a platform as much as operating systems are.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- rdevilla 7mo agoI think Andreessen's comments were borne of hyperbole and as a (deliberate) overcorrection against certain Bay Area rationalist types whose 10,000 word navel gazing screeds border on schizoidal personality disorder. I have watched these people expend literally years getting into hypothetical arguments with strawmen they believe are active participants in their community when, at best, they are occasional lurkers, and will erect entire superstructures of theory and belief that make utterly no sense to those outside of their rationalist cult. Lesswrong and motteizen type users fall squarely into this category, who also tend to cleave towards the pro-AI side of the spectrum now that, as with the rest of their lives, they are able to delegate the production of logorrhea at scale to the machine. These people are mentally unwell, and reading their proclamations is not too dissimilar to browsing a deep web trans community discussing esoteric gender theory, or even merely the slashdot comment section in 2016 - just with an extra ten paragraphs of fluff and vapidity as if they had been fed on a steady diet of the New Yorker; none of which has any correlation whatsoever to material sensate reality. No wonder there is such reverence for the hyperreality of LLM literary hallucination in these circles... Sent from my iPhone
- mpalmer 7mo agoSo not only is he not wrong, he's a keen social critic?
- rdevilla 7mo agoPersonally I cleave to the extremes of the hyperintrospective portion of the spectrum, so no, I think taken at face value his comments are absurd. Nonetheless you need to understand the dark and less visited corners of the mental landscape whence these ideas and his (putative) target audiences were borne (Bay Area rationalism), and the strategic nature of this communication which is more intended to send a message to certain sects rather than reveal anything genuine about himself or others. At these echelons communication takes on a different character. You must understand if you speak at this level.
- mpalmer 7mo ago
- gordian-mind 7mo agoWeak article. It never really tries to reconstruct what Andreessen meant, just takes a narrow quote, reads it in the least charitable way, and then spends most of its energy tearing down that version with loaded rhetoric. The comments only reinforce that impression: most are some variation of “rich guy, therefore idiot.” This is more pile-on than discussion.
- deburo 7mo agoWhich makes me curious about what Marc actually meant. The quote itself raises eyebrows. EDIT: From checking in with Claude about his talk. > So the thing he was arguing against was specifically what he sees as a modern therapeutic culture — the expectation that people should examine their motives, feel guilty about their actions, and look backward. He wasn't framing it as a philosophical position so much as a practical one about founder effectiveness. https://claude.ai/share/9c5611f7-fd0e-4f76-bd39-e1129c035a4f https://claude.ai/share/9c5611f7-fd0e-4f76-bd39-e1129c035a4f
- gordian-mind 7mo agoYes, the article is deliberately misconstruing that. The author says outright in her comments that the aim is not to engage with what Marc actually meant, but to chastise him for bad thoughts expressed on Twitter: “I get where you’re coming from - and I’m not sure I’d disagree with Marc, if that were the point he made. But his hours // days long crash out on Twitter I think made it clear that a lack of introspection was certainly at work…”
- ahnick 7mo agoThis blog post and all the comments in response feel very tautological. I think Marc has a fairly simple point here, which is don't spend time dwelling on the past. Learn from the past, take away information about how things can be improved, but then make a plan (for whatever it is that you are building/doing) and move forward with that plan. In the podcast, he basically lays out that the A16Z thesis is that there is not enough technology, information, and intelligence in the world, so they are going out and investing in companies/ideas that can make an impact in these areas. That requires learning from the past, but not dwelling on it. Seems like a very sensible and positive approach to me.
- jdelman 7mo agoThat’s simply not what introspection is, though.
- ahnick 7mo agoIntrospection is the conscious examination of one’s own mental, emotional, and cognitive processes to improve self-awareness. I think Marc's critique here is a lot of what can be learned about past mistakes is outside of an individual's own failings. I was recently reading a post about how the Claude Code leak and Boris Cherny had the following to say.. "Mistakes happen. As a team, the important thing is to recognize it’s never an individuals’s fault — it’s the process, the culture, or the infra. In this case, there was a manual deploy step that should have been better automated. Our team has made a few improvements to the automation for next time, a couple more on the way." When complex systems fail often there is more than one thing that went wrong. Uncovering what those things are is important, so that you can address them and prevent them from happening again. Once fixed, it is on to the next task and no need to dwell on the past.
- poly2it 7mo agoWhy does he need to make a historical justification for it then? It would be disingenuous if, as the blog author suggests, Andreessen knows better.
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- littlestymaar 7mo agoMarc Andreessen is wrong about many things that may be worth arguing against, but not here: this was completely idiotic take that doesn't deserve anything but contempt. And it's not like you could convinced his followers that this take is wrong, anyone gullible enough to take such an insane take at face value is very unlikely to read your rebuttal.
- loganberriess 7mo agoFirst we had techno-oligarchs attacking empathy, now they are attacking introspection? What's the endgame here?
- Hasz 7mo agoNo one knows what it means, but it's provocative… gets the people going!
- jdelman 7mo agoI’m convinced that he meant rumination, not introspection. There’s simply no way to be “high agency” without some level of introspection. Rumination is essentially a kind of excessive introspection that leads to paralysis.
- pavel_lishin 7mo agoWhat do you mean by "high agency"?
- wat10000 7mo agoI'm not sure he's entirely wrong. I have a theory that a large fraction of the population is not conscious. They go about their lives, they still work and think and have emotions in some form, but they don't actually experience. In other words, they're P-zombies. (Note: I do NOT support any actual action based on this idea. This certainly doesn't suggest that it would be morally acceptable to do anything to that group that wouldn't be acceptable to do to the rest.) This is by analogy to mental imagery. For a long time, there was a debate over whether people actually saw mental imagery in some real sense, or whether it was just a way of describing more symbolic thought. These days the general consensus seems to be that it varies, where someone might see extremely lifelike images, or more vague images, or none at all. Since it's all about internal experience, people had a hard time understanding that their experience wasn't necessarily the same as everyone else's. The same might be true of consciousness. This started out as mostly a joke or a thought experiment, but more and more I'm thinking it might actually be true. Statements like Andreessen's really push me in that direction. It's such a baffling statement... unless Andreessen is a P-zombie, then it makes perfect sense. And if he is, he probably thinks this whole consciousness idea is just a weird analogy for perception, and thinks we're a bunch of weirdos for acting like his statement isn't something obvious.
- GMoromisato 7mo agoI think introspection can sometimes turn into rumination: obsessively remembering and reliving past mistakes. It is the latter that is harmful to people, but particularly founders. This is especially true if you believe your mistakes are due to an internal flaw, because then you can't even learn from them. If you believe you are too damaged to be a good leader, then you will never lead. I confess that I'm pretty good at letting go of my own mistakes. I can somehow learn from them without blaming myself for making them. That means I'm able to make a lot of mistakes without taking emotional damage. And that lets me try new things without fear. Does that mean I'm less introspective than the average person? I don't think so, but I don't know.
- scorpionfeet 7mo agoAndressen has demonstrated he is past his prime; he is no longer relevant. We should stop giving his opinions space.
- ImPostingOnHN 7mo agoA fair chunk of the population literally does not have an inner monologue. Genetics, maybe. Perhaps Mark is one of those people, and simply lacks the capability to effectively introspect, and he's trying to turn that into a flex.
- ansley 7mo agoMarc Andreessen is wrong about a lot of things.
- igouy 7mo ago“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat. “I don’t much care where–” said Alice. “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat. “–so long as I get SOMEWHERE,” Alice added as an explanation. “Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”
- bwhiting2356 7mo agoI was reading Martin Luther's wiki article the other day: "Johann von Staupitz, his superior and frustrated confessor, concluded that Luther needed more work to distract him from excessive introspection and ordered him to pursue an academic career" [1] basically he was a moody college student [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther
- skdhfkdjfhsjk 7mo agoTranslation: the confessor was frustrated because Mr. Luther would not accept the B.S. he was being told to believe, and he thought a nice rigorous period of brainwashing in academia (controlled also by the Church) was the solution to the young man's "problem." History of course came to a different conclusion. Who controls Wikipedia, and why do they want people to think ill about Martin Luther?
- bwhiting2356 7mo agoMaybe my comment came off wrong. This wiki article made me like him a lot more, it was relatable.
- simianwords 7mo agoI unfortunately see a lot of people take the low iq interpretation of a concept and critique it because the higher iq interpretation looks quite similar unless you have done the ground work. “Rich people bad” is too easy a local optima to fall into and not escape. As for the article: the author asks move forward to what? If the author had read more on what Marc really means by move forward and what direction means, they wouldn’t have asked this. Unfortunately, the low iq critique is easy so that’s what we end up with.
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- next_xibalba 7mo agoThis whole debate is pretty weird and misguided, IMO. Marc Andreesen can be right about what works for him. Joan Westenberg can be right about what works for her. This would be obvious to a five year old. This whole brouhaha seems to be merely the setting for HN'ers (and everyone else) to continue their ongoing battles about how the world should and must be and why "the other side" is Wrong. Search through the comments here. Somehow Elon, Luigi Magnione, and Trump are pulled into the discussion.
- CalChris 7mo agoAndreesen donated $5M to the Trump campaigns. So attaching Trump's name to Andreesen seems fair.
- stewrat 7mo agoIm so glad someone wrote this. I was literally ranting out loud to myself at the gym the other day on the treadmill about how dangerous this meme of "I have no introspection, therefore I am Leet" is. He knows it's provocative, and knows its therefore memetic. You hear the other person on the podcast turning it over in his head and going "yeah, maybe I too also don't have any introspection...yeah!". Such a strong potential for abuse.
- heliumtera 7mo agoHe has no soul. Many people don't. He went so far as believing that those that tried to describe the contemplative nature such as Freud and Jung were conspiring. Contemplative nature is a scam! Yes, most people around you are hollow, completely. Another pill is, someone's face is the he exact model of their most recurrent thought. An ugly, disgusting, punchable face reveals and ugly and disgusting set of thoughts. Now you can spot the soulless, you're cursed.
- slopinthebag 7mo agoYes this is a stupid idea, but commentators are forgetting everyone has stupid ideas. I would imagine the vast majority of commentators in this thread hold one, like - Socialism / Communism is a good idea - Functional or OOP programming is a good idea - LLM's will replace programmers - Languages like Javascript, Typescript, or Python are actually good and should be used - CLI apps are better than GUI apps - Spaces are better than tabs - Religion is stupid The list honestly goes on. The only difference is that Andreessen has a platform and we don't. edit: thanks for the suggestions
- bluecheese452 7mo agoThrow tabs or spaces in there, emacs/vim, and a dose of religion and you have a complete rage bait.
- shevy-java 7mo agoSo I don't know the introspection comment to be able to make a judgement. Personally I love introspection. You work with a black box, yes? With introspection you have the ability to poke inside. That's useful. Is this what Marc meant? Is there another form of introspection? > Andreessen also said that the "great men of history didn't sit around doing this stuff." Well, that's also wrong in research. Biological cells carry an internal description (DNA almost exclusively; there are some RNA viruses but all viruses require a cell as amplifier, and cells have DNA as their genome. RNA-based genomes are quite limited, largest ones are e. g. coronavirus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus). People first had to decipher the respective genome to understand the "feature set" available here. That's also introspection if you think about it, and with synthetic biology we'll get even more here - so why would that be negative? It's awesome. Marc needs to read more books - his imagination is too limited. He is approaching Bill Gates "540kb is enough" saga (which he never said verbatim, but people like to attribute it to him ... or perhaps it was 640).
- DiscourseFan 7mo agoI think this blog post doesn't quite understand Andreessen's position. In fact, perhaps Andreessen doesn't understand his own position, which makes this even worse. Freud isn't the issue; Freud did not think the unconscious was "inside," he said the unconscious is the metapsychological apparatus which is the result of primary repression (something we all experience at a young age, since we don't remember, for instance, being potty trained, but we don't go around shitting ourselves, at least not intentionally). The ego is, at the most basic level, the skin. Its inside relatively to the outside, but there isn't a hidden subject hiding within it, you can and often do affect the inside of the body through external means, and vica versa. It was Descartes who originally came up with the idea of a separate "inner" world vs a "outer" experience, the thinking ego-cogito and what it perceives in extension in the world. This formulation has been troublesome for philosophy hence, but in fact it was Freud (and not Heidegger) who succeeded, after a long line of attempts in the 19th century, in radicalizing the ego-cogito and decimated the notion of "inner experience" in the 20th century, which became key to the developments of both psychology and philosophy (hence the ironic reference to the Vienna circle). And more than Freud, in Andreesen's case, it was Nick Land, who took Freud even further, and expanded this idea to refer to unity in general,so that the 0, even that of the computer programming, the empty unity, became its own activity in a broader economy of information and energetics, and this 0 was both that of the psyche-soma, and that of the symbolic movement in computer logic. And that is what Andreesen is trying to refer to, but he is not very well read, of course, he spends most of his time working in tech but he reads this sort of thing and talks to a lot of people who are more well read than he is.
- simianwords 7mo agoYou have got it right (though IDK what you mean by unity and zero), the author is even less well read than Andreesen so their arguments make no sense since they don't have this background.
- DiscourseFan 7mo agoThere some work on it in Fanged Noumena. The Kant essay at the beginning is definitely the most intelligible, but they are all good.
- alun 7mo agoA lot of people become "stuck in their ways" as they get older. Marc saying this about introspection might be an example of it starting to happen to him. By definition, "being stuck in your own ways" is having a lack of introspection.
- NoGravitas 7mo agoIt's also worth looking at where Andreeson seats the origin of harmful introspection - in turn of the last century Vienna, with Freud. That is to say, introspection is a product of Judeo-bolshivism, created by the Jews to sap Aryan man of his natural vitality and dominance. It's sick, but it's just another example, along with the admiration of Italian Futurism, of how Andreeson has immersed himself in a fascist milieu.
- simianwords 7mo agoThe author conflates anti introspection and post-introspection. Marc is not against introspection, he clearly identifies that a few hundred years ago introspection wasn't all that common. Marc clearly identifies as post-introspection in that there's something beyond just humans constantly looking inwards (which seems to be the Author's passtime). There's a fine balance between contemplating what to do and focusing on doing - perhaps Andreesen thinks that the balance needs to be shifted righwards. On the topic of Sigmund Freud: The author fails to understand that it takes a critical mass of people to develop functionalities for the society to meaningfully change. In the same way that Hinduism identified atheism multiple thousands of years ago, but that didn't bring any meaningful change in the society until the west brought modernism.
- theahura 7mo ago> a few hundred years ago introspection wasn't all that common Marcus Aurelius, Napoleon, Lincoln, the founding fathers, and a long slate of writers and philosophers would like a word
- simianwords 7mo agoYou are again making the same mistake, please try to understand what I'm saying. Atheism was a known concept at least amongst some priestly class in India but that didn't matter - the larger part of the society was not developed enough to understand it. Society only meaningfully changes when a critical mass of people understand and apply a concept - in this case introspection.
- skdhfkdjfhsjk 7mo agoI was clearly 'developed enough' to understand atheism at a young age, given that I was a notorious atheist at a Bible Belt school. Not exactly a viewpoint with a lot of popular support in those days. But then I later realized that there actually is a God. (No, not Lucifer.) Hopefully you will be 'developed enough' to come to a similar understanding yourself later in life. Hint: atheism is what came first. Those are the "nephilim" tribes spoken of in the Bible. "In those days there were nephilim." It literally means "people without a belief in God." Religion was a higher level development.
- erikerikson 7mo agoNon-introspection is a fantastic source of strategic vulnerability. It can facilitate a bias to action which has it's clear value. However, if you are creating a highly valuable asset then it puts you in a position where you are extremely easy to manipulate and harvest. Perhaps this serves VCs quite well.
- fnordpiglet 7mo agoI worked with Marc a very long time ago when he was just another nerd and he is the last man I would go to for advice on how to live life. I think if you go to Marc over, say, the Buddha for advice on how to live life you are probably not going to be rich like Marc - that was a lot more path dependency than philosophical inevitability - nor enlightened like the Buddha. You’ll just be an angry man boy that people generally can’t stand to be around. I thought the best juxtaposition for Marc was when he would present before or after Jim Barksdale - who was in fact a man of extreme dynamism, a true leader, and quintessential entrepreneur. Marc in comparison was an awkward angry man boy that was as inspiring as a cucumber salad. What Marc did that Jim didn’t was Marc took his wealth and distributed it randomly in various pump and dump schemes and managed to play odds pretty well. This enabled a lot of businesses to come about. Marc didn’t make them. He used his Netscape money to gamble well on them. Jim however actually built things, over and over, that pushed the limits of what man can do. But I wouldn’t look to Jim on how to live a life worth living either. Buddha, Socrates, there’s thousands of years of well worn insight, and these guys just spend their energy and lives on other things. You would be a fool to listen to them. Learn their biography sure - they’re interesting. But they’re not insightful.
- owenthejumper 7mo agoAs a billionaire you can afford to just go, because unlike us mortals you are shielded from all consequences. It's also why the tech moguls are now called oligarchs. Because they kind of are.
- annor 7mo agoNot worth a blog post, lets a comment to warm up my fingers.
- pclowes 7mo ago> “His manifesto obsesses over abundance, over the elimination of material suffering, and a future in which technology has lifted constraints that currently limit human possibility. These are goals I can get behind. But "forward" presupposes that you know where you're going, and knowing where you're going presupposes that you know what you want” Want we want is often in direct opposition to our flourishing. I sincerely doubt a humanity without constraints will ever be fulfilled or happy. The more “free” we make ourselves the more miserable we seem to become. Across cultures and history the things that limit our freedom the most are where humans find meaning. You cant have duty, responsibility, honor and also be full detached and unentangled. Nothing significant is not also (at times) burdensome.
- jorisboris 7mo agoI don’t think that if you read as much as Marc that you can do it without introspection. Correct me if wrong but you always pick up learnings and ideas which apply to your own life. I do understand where he’s coming from. One of my forms of procrastination is reading my old notes and pondering and pretending I’m self-improving. But it’s actually a way to avoid action. And I did learn that if you want to get somewhere, action is what gets you there. Not endless introspection.
- crhulls 7mo ago[dead]
- MattGrommes 7mo agoI've been increasingly confident in my thought that these VCs and tech leaders are basically people who used other people's money to pull the arm on a hundred slot machines. After they win a few times they start to think they're experts at slot machines, not just lucky. Over time, they start to think they're also experts at other things, and because they have money people start to listen to them. Unfortunately they just keep proving me right on this.
- lawrenceyan 7mo agoWhat Andreessen is hinting at, albeit still largely surface level, is 无心 or no mind. Popular in martial arts and Buddhist philosophy, I think practically what you should take away is that body and mind are fundamentally intertwined. Introspection is a practice of the mind, specifically cognition centered around portions of the brain like the prefrontal cortex. There’s a lot more to who you are and areas you can hone / cultivate. The HN crowd is probably overweighted on cognition, and could do with spending more time in other areas: https://www.cheltenhamzen.co.uk/writings/gut-instinct https://www.cheltenhamzen.co.uk/writings/gut-instinct
- gwerbin 7mo agoThat is a very very very charitable interpretation of what he's saying.
- zackmorris 7mo agoAndreessen's criticism of introspection, and Musk's criticism of empathy, are projections of their fear of being disconnected from spirit (primarily the notion that we're all one). Some of us eventually find ourselves in situations that defy logical explanation. I've witnessed my own thoughts and plans rippling out into the world and causing external events to unfold. To the point that now, I'm not sure that someone could present evidence to me to prove that our inner and outer worlds aren't connected. It's almost as hard of a problem as science trying to solve how consciousness works, which is why it has nothing to say about it and leaves it to theologians. The closest metaphysical explanation I have found is that consciousness exists as a field that transcends 4D timespace, so our thoughts shift our awareness into the physical reality of the multiverse that supports its existence. Where one 4D reality is deterministic without free will, 5D reality is stochastic and may only exist because of free will. And this happens for everyone at all times, so that our individuality can be thought of as drops condensed out of the same ocean of consciousness. One spirit fragmented into countless vantage points to subjectively experience reality in separation so as to not be alone. Meaning that one soul hoarding wealth likely increases its own suffering in its next life. That realization is at odds with stuff like western religion and capitalism, so the wealthy reject it to protect their ego. Without knowing that (or denying that) ego death can be a crucial part of the ascension process. My great frustration with this is the power imbalance. Most of us spend the entirety of our lives treading water, sacrificing some part of our prosperity for others. We have trouble stepping back from that and accepting the level of risk and/or ruthlessness required to take from others to give to ourselves. We lose financially due to our own altruism, or more accurately the taking advantage of that altruism by people acting amorally. Meanwhile those people win financially and pull up the ladder behind them. They have countless ways, means and opportunities to reduce suffering for others, but choose not to. The embrace or rejection of altruism shouldn't be what determines financial security, but that's the reality we find ourselves in. Nobility become its opposite. That's what concepts like taxing the rich are about. In late-stage capitalism, a small number of financial elites eventually rig the game so that others can't win, or arguably even play. It's the economic expression of the paradox of tolerance. So the question is, how much more of this are we willing to tolerate before the elites reach the endgame and see the world burn?
- aaronkc94 7mo agoI think the nuance is between reflection and introspection (which I interpret as rumination) Rumination is not specifically in effort to solve, but rather to continue to analyze, which can lead to the definition of insanity; doing the same thing but expecting a different result That distinction empowers problem solving instead of spiraling. But this is my perpsective of Andreeson's statement
- mnmnmn 7mo ago[dead]
- tim333 7mo agoImpressive amount of coverage for rich guy says slightly dumb thing on a podcast. Here's the actual podcast bit for those interested https://youtu.be/qBVe3M2g_SA?t=57 https://youtu.be/qBVe3M2g_SA?t=57 He's asked why not introspective and says >Yeah. I don't I don't know. I've just I found people who dwell in the past get stuck in the past. It's it's just it's a real problem and it's it's a problem at work and it's a problem at home. which is fair enough, but then suggests that stuff started with Freud which is historically inaccurate but I mean he's a tech guy on a podcast, not a historian.
- xtiansimon 7mo agoSeems clear to me MA is operating in his own reality bubble, and must carefully consider his intended audience. iIt seems he’s always selling. I listened to a recent episode of the a16z podcast, and he’s talking like Steve Bannon. Only makes sense if he’s pandering to that group of business people who are following that line of politics. “a16z's New Media Playbook“, https://a16z.simplecast.com/episodes/a16zs-new-media-playbook https://a16z.simplecast.com/episodes/a16zs-new-media-playboo...