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.
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.
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.
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