"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!
Marc Andreessen's dangerously unexamined life
21–30 of 59 posts
Re: Marc Andreessen's dangerously unexamined life
#22As 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.
Re: Marc Andreessen's dangerously unexamined life
#23It’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…
Don't forget Lawnmower Ellison
Re: Marc Andreessen's dangerously unexamined life
#24Adreessen 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…
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.
Re: Marc Andreessen's dangerously unexamined life
#25> 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.
Buddhists really should get in on the introspective thing one of these years.
Re: Marc Andreessen's dangerously unexamined life
#26> 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.
Re: Marc Andreessen's dangerously unexamined life
#27I'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.
Re: Marc Andreessen's dangerously unexamined life
#28Paywall: 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.
Re: Marc Andreessen's dangerously unexamined life
#29Related recent discussion:
>Marc Andreessen is a philosophical zombie
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47445593 (33 comments)
Re: Marc Andreessen's dangerously unexamined life
#30Adreessen 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…
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.