Interview with Marc Andreessen on learning to love the humanities, and RSS
conversationswithtyler.com
conversationswithtyler.com
What a shockingly shallow and irresponsible dismissal of AI-safety concerns by a man who has the means to know better.
Hope A16z is loaded up on algorithmic stablecoin investments.
Is this "fact" correct?
Edit: It turns out utterly not. The Basilicas, for instance, were office buildings for public administration.
Why make up something like this?
You may not feel you owe VC billionaires (or whoever) better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
I opened up YC to browse while listening/watching his interview with Michael Malice, also from today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elXWle3JNrI.
If it doesn’t do this, then you can steal the car by selling the NFT, simultaneously disabling the car’s Internet connection, and driving off. Now the NFT is held by one person but the physical car is held by another.
If you want to sell the car, simply hand off the physical NFT to the new owner.
Or if it does open without Internet, then you can buy the house NFT, but the seller disabled the Internet connection in the house so the door doesn't know about the transaction. Now you're locked out even though you theoretically own the house on the blockchain.
Turns out the blockchain doesn't solve ownership of physical objects. You still need intermediaries like the police and courts to decide who owns the house.
We've had the electrical power grid for over a century, but power cuts and brownouts are still a thing.
Designing vital systems to assume 100% reliability of shared systems is dangerous.
Keys are already decentralized and fully controlled by me. I can copy it and distribute it freely. Putting an intermediary (a blockchain) between myself and access to my house just seems silly.
I don't know about "no need for intermediaries" because of course you need someone who creates and maintains this blockchain, since blockchains are not present in nature (perhaps that is a decentralized group of people but the blockchain and its maintainers are then the intermediary between the two parties) so let's focus on the no physical key part.
If the primary benefit of blockchain is that only the registered owner of the house can get access to it, on that blockchain, that's a pretty weak feature and actually pretty shit. I would like my family to also get access to my house, as well as perhaps other people like houseguests or a maid etc. Keys seem to work pretty well, nobody is pounding down the door to buy "smart locks" as far as I can tell.
I'm not saying blockchain won't provide transformative utility, it might, but it probably won't look like what we imagine it will (existing paradigms, but on a blockchain).
And as for sharing keys with family members, perhaps just list them as sub-members of the owning member on the blockchain. When the owner changes, all previous sub-members lose access too. This can probably be done using a smart contract
But real estate law does not.
(I also know nothing of the space, just engaging to build my own understanding.)
This shouldn’t be surprising. They didn’t get rewarded by the market for being interesting, unlike, say, the interviewer.
MA continues to talk his book when it comes to crypto/web3 which is fine but that’s like a goldbug talking up gold. It’s boring.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(less in fact. Government education spending is higher as a % of GDP than ever.)
It is mistaken think that access to high quality subsidized public education has been uniformly or meritocratically accessible across the generations or class or other dimensions.
Just defense of Marc. Talk about missing the forest for a tree. There was nothing but extreme growth to be had when exporting to the world the items needed to re-establish their manufacturing base.
But naaah; the world was rebuilt due to the brilliance of a handful of computer nerds in one nation.
The only quote that explains it for me is: “You took too much, man. You took too much, too much.”
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"?
he's been getting into Moldbug, so uh
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.
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.
I suspect many would be happy to do pass fail.
It will make you, at best, a keen observer. Some people can make a living writing books about their observations and assertions formed from them. Most, however, will not.
How much extra value does one more person writing about Locke or Rawles really give society? It depends entirely on how many we already have.
For commercial artists- designers and such for companies- it is usually a good living.
The people doing history, for example, are the grad students and faculty who dig into archives and write books. They, largely, are shit on by society and are working in a field that pays virtually all of them like crap.
And they don't repeat themselves. The Nth person to write a book on Topic X isn't just saying what has already been said. They are in dialog with all of the other authors. They reinterpret and recast the history. They view it through different methods or they create new methods that others will use in the future.
From the link:
Despite the key role physicists played in ending World War II, some members of Congress were skeptical of paying a hefty price tag for a machine that did not seem to directly benefit the U.S. national interest.
During Wilson’s testimony, then-senator John Pastore bluntly asked, "Is there anything connected with the hopes of this accelerator that in any way involves the security of the country?"
"No, sir, I don’t believe so," Wilson replied.
"It has no value in that respect?"
"It has only to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of man, our love of culture. It has to do with: Are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending."
[0] https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201804/history.cfm
Thank you for sharing. This is one of the most thought provoking lines I have ever read. People and politicians often forget that making a country worth defending is as important as the act of defense.
Or maybe it's a proof of the intelligence of a elected official?
And the same is true for many other VC types, who, if it were not for the fact that founders and companies need their money, would have the same intellectual and "lived-life" weight of your run-of-the-mills 9-to-5 office worker.
He speaks way too fast which gives the impression is "throwing up" words instead of making a point. Chill. It is an interview, not a slam poetry the-quickest-wins contest.
He is asked how to identify talent and after working in VC for 15-20 years he gives a made-up answer on the spot. I don't think he is guarding some secrets, it appears he has not developed a theory. Which is fine, or the theory is implicit, he is looking for "vibes" more than "hard" traits after all the necessary boxes are checked (smart, persistent, able to articulate thoughts). Hard to disagree. If there were a secret, it'd be out there already found. But the made-up answer was not impressive at all (a videotape of when they were kids? Come on).
He talks about web3 and he comes up with ways of monetizing, say, podcasts with proposals that you would expect from a teenager. At the end, he basically admits he has no clue and the future will take care of itself.
He has watched many movies, but he doesn't have a favorite one.
He seems unfazed by selection biases. Peter Thiel is a great at recognizing talent, he says. How many would be recognize with 1/1000th of his money and how many he did not recognize?
He repeats "insights" and "talking points" gotten from twitter, social media, the usual playgrounds that myself, a total nobody, could repeat with more flavor.
He had a few interesting insights (saying they were "brilliant" would be quite arrogant on my part), surely. Not enough to be considered "brilliant".
1) It's a haven for grifters right now
2) They're investing in Adam Neuman
Any explanation I can think of - outside of incompetence - veers pretty close to "might be criminal enterprise".
I thought you were talking about an investment in WeWork way back in the day, for which I think that could be forgiven.
But no, they RECENTLY invested in Neumann's new crypto start-up: https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/24/flowcarbon-wework-adam-neu...
a) it's a private P2P e-cash system, to
b) it's a digital asset and a hedge against inflation, to
c) it's saving people in Venezuela the Central African Republic
.... maybe it's failed.
But in the end, no one knows the correspondence between money amount and intellectual and lived life weight. That's a market thing. Everyone's option is mixed together and give to a weight of collective market dynamism.
Oh yeah, it ran on 5 operating systems (I used the OS/2 version myself)
The breadth of features that were added between Netscape 1.0 and Netscape 3.0 in 2 year span was pretty astounding at that time. People forget how many critical features were added to Netscape 3.0 that would define so much of the web today and make it commercially viable.
The most visible SV VCs don't do themselves any favors. Granting the "I can built a successful company" component, there are many who then claim to understand society, politics, philosophy, and everything in between. Then they loudly talk about their opinions. And then people see it, and think "wow, not super smart huh".
The cherry on the cake is how many of these VC people get mad about cancel culture, cuz it turns out that social media means they have way more people calling them stupid to their face (an experience they likely don't have in their day to day life, as the person with the money/firing capabilities). (To be fair I also don't have people calling me stupid to my face and it sounds unpleasant)
Of course there are many VCs who don't play this game, don't pretend to have seen behind the curtain of the universe, and people don't make fun of them on Twitter. And many of those people are plenty successful and fine.
But there are a couple who become the butt of jokes because they like saying the name Socrates
That might be Ben Horowitz, the titular partner at A16Z. His Twitter is relatively quiet, mostly just retweeting other A16Z people's tweets.
In his book "The Hard Thing About Hard Things", every chapter begins with a rap lyric from golden-age era hiphop (80s, 90s). It's quite ridiculous contrasting lyrics about street life and hustling to Horowitz's tales of trying to build enterprise unicorns. But in book format, it comes off as well-meaning tribute from a fan and not a cynical way of conflating the struggles of the American poor with say Loudcloud going through a down round.
But on Twitter, which is combative to begin with, him quoting Nas or Jay-Z while bloviating about Web3 would invite derision right away.
He is an amazing technologist, but it appears to me that when he, and many other VCs, go beyond the boundaries of their technical expertise, they know as much as the guy who get their news from twitter. Their fame and worth sometimes prevent me from commenting on their nonsense on Twitter because I say to myself, who am I to criticize someone who moves billions?
I got the same vibe from a few too many CEO, CTO, and other assorted C- of big and famous companies. The CTO of my previous company, which had a total number of employees greater than 150,000 heads, was terribly underwhelming any time they decided to give their opinion on current business, and the future of the business and of the technology supporting the business. But they were never criticized because they were the CTO of a company of 150,000 people and therefore inherently extraordinary. The principle of authority does not work in science and works a bit more (too much!) in business because the authority can move the market, but not because the authority is right.
It is fine, of course, nobody is a genius everywhere, and as the comment said, he has been incredibly successful, 10,000 more than I have been. But some people, for the worship they get, are more disappointing than others when they show their true, and not assumed, intellectual range.
What should he be saying instead? who is someone who is really smart then, excluding mathematicians or physicists?
Einstein was a brilliant physicist. Otherwise he was not a paragon of human virtues.
Maradona was a brilliant soccer player. As a coach he was a disaster.
I have nothing against Andreessen, and, of course, he is 1,000 the professional that I could not even aspire but dream of being. But outside of technology, I don't find him convincing. He is very articulate and can speak without thinking, and that is a huge and massive advantage when you are in a position of professional and intellectual power.
Obama's success has undoubtedly and largely been aided by his ability to be tremendously effective in public speaking.
Yeah, one of the things that I keep coming back to is Acquired Situational Narcissism. I can name a number of very successful people who I used to listen to as insightful that now seem banal to me. I'm sure I've gotten more discerning, but I'm also sure, as in Andreessen's case, that there's been a real decline.
A pretty easy explanation here is that being truly insightful is partly a function of circumstance. If you can say basically anything and have people around you exclaim, "Amazing! Brilliant!" then you don't have a lot of incentive for working harder. If you're insulated from reality by vast swathes of power and money, you don't get the corrective-whack-on-the-nose feeling from unpleasant encounters with reality.
It's akin to how I think getting a permanent newspaper columnist is a curse. A lot of those people used to be really interesting once upon a time. But I think it's the very rare one who doesn't devolve into being almost cartoonishly predictable.
Not sure why that's supposed to be a bad thing.
> And the same is true for many other VC types
Andreessen isn't just one of those "VC types". He is the co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser. [1]
If you don't consider him to be brilliant, I'm curious to know who in the same space do think is?
But say, you meet up with someone and they say they watch plenty of baseball games. And you ask them, "who is your favorite baseball player?". If they answer, "can I answer with my favorite tennis player?" or they say "I don't have a favorite player", I would find equally bizarre and suspicious.
It reminded of an episode that happened to me a few years ago. A colleague was talking about a person we both knew (apparently) and he said, of course I know her, we spend time together, we went on vacation together, man, I don't remember her name now. Did they go on vacation together? Did they know each other? Did he have cognitive problems?
Now MA is a VC guy, a few decades ago he built Mosaic. I'm not saying he's not fantastic at building web browsers, he is a genius, but I find that if the same interview had been given by someone who gets less credit than the inventor of Mosaic, he would have been taken little seriously from that point on.
But I could say the same about Gross, who was interviewed along with Cowen during their "book tour." He has made tens of millions or more from technology, but during their interviews he appeared rather light on the intellectual side.
not fast enough
Unfortunately Roberts (the host) barely pressed Andreesen on his visionary love-fest for NFTs and crypto, which barely surpassed the typical nonsense spewed on twitter from NFT nuts who just so happen to have a lot to gain from folks buying in to their latest crypto site or NFT marketplace. Lots of talk of decentralized data and the power of people owning their own data, and ignoring the reality that 1) this idea has failed before and 2) it has always failed in the face of massive corporate greed, convenience, and walled gardens.
Andreesen was right about "software eating the world", I just wish he (or any VCs with his money and power) would try to grapple with or even acknowledge the negative consequences that have come from it.
I would venture the primary cause of the increase in wealth disparity from the 1970s to today is the outsourcing of labor overseas paired with financial engineering.
Just look at the ridiculous indulgences VC funds have propped up over the past decade:
- social media apps that can only make money with ads and tracking
- exchanges where you can trade dog money
- office rentals, but at a made-up $50bn valuation
- "homesharing" rentals (don't call it a hotel because regulations)
- "ridesharing" (don't call it a taxi because regulations)
And let's not forget a key logistical challenge for human society -- food delivery.
You may not feel you owe VC billionaires (or whoever) better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.