Marc Andreessen's dangerously unexamined life | Hacker News Reader

Marc Andreessen's dangerously unexamined life

thenation.com

80 pointscassidius57 comments

> If you go back, like, 400 years ago, it never would have occurred to anybody to be introspective

Dunno, Shakespeare died 410 years ago and soliloquies on internal moral dilemmas and emotional states in Macbeth, Othello and Hamlet are a cornerstone of those plays.

Yeah. I'd invert his assumption. Any reading of history shows a lot of introspection. Read the writings of everyday soldiers in the Civil War. Read any writings from any of the Catholic thinkers of the last 2000 years. Read the Greeks and Romans. Marcus Aurelius was exceptional in his quality, but not in his direction. There are so many such examples throughout history that I think it would be much harder to examples of the lack of introspection.

If anything, I think the lack of introspection is a mostly modern phenomenon.

Buddhists really should get in on the introspective thing one of these years.

And homer and the entire corpus of greek plays.

The unexamined life is not worth living ~ 400 BC

I imagine Andreessen was kind of trolling?

Isn’t introspection a necessary ingredient to form morals?

Nesbit and Wilson(1977)[1] suggest that we have little or no direct intro-spective access to higher order cognitive processes.

Most of our behaviors are a result of System I thinking and most of our moral rationalizations exist as System II thinking. It's extremely difficult to do what we feel is wrong so it's easier to intellectually synthesize a frame where we're morally correct than force ourselves to act against our possibly wrong intuitions.

1. https://home.csulb.edu/~cwallis/382/readings/482/nisbett%20s...

The quote is so obviously idiotic that I'd be shocked if it weren't quoted out of context entirely for clickbait. That being said I am not going to find and listen to that podcast to find out.

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

and I find it impossible to believe that he didn't get a big dose of ideology from that source.

> 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.

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

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

>"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:)

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.

> 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

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.

> 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.

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.

AI gives smart dumb an army of robotic backhoes.

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.

That guy isn't a boxer.

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

Fitting that he was such a good friend of Epstein.

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.

What I find particularly interesting about this philosophical approach is how much it comes across like nothing so much as just searching for a plausible excuse for intellectual laziness.

Real introspection can be challenging and lead to some uncomfortable realizations about yourself, so it's understandable why someone might want to shy away from it. But rather than just admit that as a shortcoming and an opportunity for personal improvement, because admitting the need for personal improvement is also challenging, it's easy to concoct a reality where lack of introspection isn't just OK but actually the preferable alternative.

Adreessen seems like he's working from a definition of "introspection" that is something like: "negative thoughts and feelings towards the self; unproductive self-criticism, regret"

In other words, a mental doom-loop. But that's not really what introspection means at all.

Healthy introspection is simply attention, curiosity and reasoning applied to the self. It doesn't have to be the kind of mental self-flagellation he suggests.

It is of course, incredibly valuable - I think its basically the opposable thumb of the mind.

I view people like him like large satellites or small planets that have been crashing through everything mindlessly and creating this wake of wreckage. The only way to keep going is to not look back, or in this framing, not look in.

In single-minded pursuit of a simple goal and with early success they reduce their own humanity so that their repeated actions can maintain their simple function.

Looking anywhere behind/within has become so overwhelming and so painful they will construct elaborate narrative and even engage in medical assistance (eg ketamine) to avoid the consequences of integration.

Yeah, it feels like the real lede here may not be "Andressen is a soulless weirdo" but "It's very clear that a lot of our tech 'leaders' are soulless weirdos, which is why this feels like a good explanation of what he's saying."

Can we keep the term "weirdo" positive?

A lot of the people once called weirdos -- a term now partly taken back, as fairly positive, such as in "weird nerds" -- are our hackers, creative thinkers and artists, progressives slightly ahead of history, etc.

The massive problem with tech industry "leaders" is not weirdos/nerds. It's greedy sociopaths, narcissists, and nepo baby halfwits who merely stumbled into way too much power.

Some prominent ones are now openly and proudly presenting themselves as toxic for society/humanity, and even as ruthless fascists.

Call the bad people what they are, but let's be nice to the good weirdos.

> thumb of the mind

An apt choice of words given the subject's unique blessing

Related recent discussion:

>Marc Andreessen is a philosophical zombie

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47445593 (33 comments)

As I recall, Andreesen's descent started with his being publicly criticized during the cancel culture movement of the mid 2010s. This seems to relate to that - perhaps the criticism came so hard he couldn't take it, and his solution was to refuse to think about it.

To be fair, when you paired callout culture (a better name than cancel culture) with the toxic herd dynamics of Twitter as a platform (IMO Twitter has always been toxic), the result could be very brutal and unfair.

Someone decides you committed a faux pas, and people pile on, and this gets attention, which means the algorithm pushes it, and pushes the most inflammatory discourse around it. This creates a feedback loop that pushes things to maximum toxicity because, well, this keeps people on the app and seeing ads.

It worked with the nascent new right and Gamergate, and it worked for "woke" callout culture. The algorithm doesn't care about the angle. It just "likes" toxicity and lynch mobs because it drives engagement.

Algorithmic social media is a disease. It's an unmitigated net negative value for humanity, far more than even trash TV or tabloid journalism (due to addiction dynamics). It's like the fentanyl of the mind and the social discourse. If you work on it, you might be doing more overall harm than someone working on weapons. At least a weapon only attacks a small number of people at once, while this mass-lobotomizes the entire human race.

The best thing to do when targeted by such things is tell them to fuck off and close the browser or delete the app. If you engage, this drives the algorithmic feedback cycle. But all these guys are social media (esp Twitter) addicts.

"Examine yourselves as to whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Do you not know yourselves..."

~2 Corinthians 13:5~ Freud

Two Corinthians, that's the ball game right there!

I've always been a bit embarrassed by the extent of my self-conciousness, but recently I'm starting to think of it as more of a virtue than a hindrance.

Virtue is something the virtueless prey upon. However, the takeaway is not to abandon virtue, it's to censure the virtueless. There are far more of us than there are of them.

The most dangerous people throughout history take morality very seriously. They have so much commitment to their moral system that they're willing to kill millions of people to enforce it.

People like Andreessen are not without morality. Their moral system is right-libertarianism.

The people I am least afraid of are those who are without a deep fixation on morality.

The person you're replying to was talking about "virtue", which I'd argue is an entirely different thing than "morality". Virtues are traits that can help people be better humans, while morals are rules separating right and wrong. Things like courage, patience, introspection, kindness, etc, are all virtues, while morals tend to be much more of the Ten Commandments variety.

I don't think anyone has ever killed people or gone to war for a virtue, but they certainly have to enforce their moral code on others. Probably the worst combination is people with strong moral beliefs but few virtues, since their lack of virtue both fails to temper their moral fury and poorly guides the moral determinations they get so fired up about.

> Virtues are traits that can help people be better humans, while morals are rules separating right and wrong.

Insofar as there is a difference at all, (what people see as) virtues are generalizations of (what they hold to be) moral rules or, viewed another way, moral rules are the operationalizations that give concrete meaning to the platitudes of virtues. They are inseparable, even if notionally distinct categories.

I think there's a Goldilocks zone of moral flexibility and openness somewhere in between complete moral rigidness and total amorality, I think.

The zone of moral rigidness contains all those species of fundamentalism that have caused so much conflict and atrocity. It's one one of the very bad zones.

But another very bad zone is the total amorality of psychopaths and narcissists (and they often pretend to be in the other zones), and they are also responsible for so much destruction an atrocity.

Marc is a poster boy for why a liberal arts education is essential.

What is with not mentioning the podcast? Seems like such a bizarre artifact to reference it and then not site it at all.

I'd argue (simplistically) that AI is largely introspection.

"If I were introspective, I'd have to admit that I was really lucky, I am not special, and that the govt funded the things that helped me get rich. I'd also have to admit that my current worldview and that of my peers/friends is inherently evil and we are destroying the world. So instead I'll just pretend introspection is bad."

It’s funny that everyone is coming around to understanding the rich elite are mostly socio- and psychopaths. People who were clued into them early were told they were rude for calling them out but now the they are just admitting it straight up.

I’m sorry to say it but Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg, Sama, and Bezos are clearly on that spectrum. And no, it’s not autism it’s sociopathy — they view us as NPCs and call empathy a weakness and a scam. And if you think this is rude to say, I don’t because the palpable lack of empathy at the highest echelons of power (from POTUS down) is becoming a real liability for humanity as a whole given the amount of power they have amassed.

The double standard I see across all political and cultural lines is people that demand empathy for them while they demonstrate none for an arbitrary outgroup or one specific to their personal lived experience. This is basically using emotion to drive thoughts rather than emotions to inform thoughts. I have doubts this will go away anytime soon given it takes an incredible amount of effort for people to critically examine themselves. I liken it to debugging and reverse engineering your brain and nervous system.

Don't forget Lawnmower Ellison

Actually I would prefer to lol. But yes, him especially. I think there is a sort of necessary degree of narcissism and megalomania that must be involved to run corporations of this scale. Which is fine and all but when your product is a beta quality robotic death machine and you want to run your tests on public roads, or let’s get teens addicted to our product on purpose and who cares if they off themselves, that’s when it crosses from “quirky control freak” (jobs) to “dangerous megalomaniac” (the rogues gallery from the last post)

Agree

The dark triad personalities are over represented in the c-suites in general and other positions of power and status (ie politics) because they value nothing else - and are one of the greatest sources of human misery and atrocity there has ever been. Honestly, it's one of humanity's biggest unsolved challenges - how to structure society and institutions in ways that elevate benevolent competence and constrain or keep out the psychopaths

When they get the power of the state or state-like powers through technology, very bad things happen

I miss Alex Karp on your list.

I can tell you that even on HN, most people have still not come around to it. If in a thread about Ellisson or Thiel or their respective companies you point out that Bezos, Zuck and Sama - and as a result the companies they lead and the use of their capital - are in the exact same spot on the sociopathy spectrum, this immediately invites hordes of downvotes by the (ex-)FAANG HNers who can't come to terms with the fact their whole net worth is based on growing the power of just as despicable of leaders as the ones they're busy chastising.

Paywall: https://web.archive.org/web/20260324230642/https://www.thena...

> and a man with an impossibly large head

I think Andreessen sucks, but I think body-shaming him is lame too, especially in the opening sentence (yes I read the whole article and agree with it to the point that I have nothing to say about the rest)

Not defending the body-shaming, but I imagine the reference to his large head is meant to be a double entendre. Figuratively, a massive ego. Literally, a big head.

When you read quotes like this you might remember that the wealthy can be unremarkable, uneducated and unskilled just like anyone else. They are not special. Sometimes they can even be shocklingly ignorant fools like Marc Andreesen.

Sounds like something a psychopath would say.

The video [0] that has a transcript provides a little more context.

A. Andreessen, I'd bet, enjoys a degree of controversy and nothing gets people activated so much as "being wrong on the Internet." [1]

B. In context, Andreessen's critique of "introspection" has to do with a particular variety, "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." Probably a better term for Andreessen to use is "rumination." But, given A., that would be less controversial.

C. More broadly, there is some criticism of how "know thyself" is interpreted today and perhaps in TFA, which is less than developed. In the Meaning Crisis lecture series Vervaeke [2] notes:

  That's not what "Know thyself" means. It doesn't mean that kind of stroking 
  of your autobiographical ego. Know thyself is much more a kind of direct 
  participatory knowing. It means understanding how you operate. It's not - if 
  I were to use a literary analogy - it's not like your autobiography, it's 
  more like your owner's manual.

D. Criticism of Andreessen seems to have the generic perspective of public health in mind rather than the perspective of "I'm happy that works for you." Consider for a moment how hard it is for a person to realize that the minds of other people are drastically different from one's own, such as having an "inner monologue" or not [3] and how “Introspection reveals that one is frequently conscious of some form of inner speech, which may appear either in a condensed or expanded form.” [4] The inner experience of Andreessen may be very different from that of his critics.

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBVe3M2g_SA

1. https://xkcd.com/386/

2. https://www.meaningcrisis.co/episode-4-socrates-and-the-ques...

3. https://ryanandrewlangdon.wordpress.com/2020/01/28/today-i-l...

4. https://hurlburt.faculty.unlv.edu/hurlburt-heavey-2018.pdf

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