Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection • Hacker News Board

Re: Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection

#261

Post by Zigurd » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 4:58 PM UTC

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #215

mayneack wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may or may not be true in aggregate, but for extreme outliers it's impossible to separate from survivorship bias. Are Musk and Andreeson really the most skilled entrepreneurs in the world or are they just good enough for luck to propel them to stratospheric success?

They’re just the most ruthless If you look at the entire entirety of understood history of biology: The most ruthless always wins That is to say if I go into a village and kill all the adults and teenagers and steal all the kids who are scared to be killed by me, then I will win in the probably two successive generations that I’ve been able to successfully brainwashing into thinking I’m some kind of God. That is unti…

That's not how humans came to populate areas that previously were dominated by predators who would be obviously deadly to individual humans. Cooperation and planning are what made physically weak humans dominant. That cooperation and planning developed and flourished without authoritarian structures.

Re: Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection

#262

Post by asdff » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 4:58 PM UTC

Teever wrote: post #242

visarga wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In their minds, financial success is the ultimate yardstick. In a loopy recursive way, it is. Cost gates what we can do and become. Paying back your costs to extend your runway is the working principle behind biology, economy and technology. I am not saying rich people are always right, just that cost is not so irrelevant to everything else. I personally think cost satisfaction explains multiple levels, from biolog…

No. it certainly isn't. I'm damn near broke right now but it would be obvious to you if you spent ten minutes with me that I'm healthier both mentally and physically than either of those two and I can walk down any street with relative impunity and talk with any stranger I meet without concern that they'd recognize me and have beef with me over some stupid shit I did online. I know that when I interact with people it…

The curse of fame is really underappreciated. Rich and famous people obviously never talk about it in public as it is going against the narrative that builds their brands, but they feel it. They are so jealous of the quietly rich who no one will recognize. Who can still live the same life as you and I. They really are trapped. They basically have to fall of the face of the earth and age out of their appearance to have a chance of obscurity. And their line of work makes that impossible.

They can't go to grocery stores. They can't go to parks. They can't go to casual events. They can't be spontaneous and they can't be serendipitous. Any relationship they have with people is in the shadow of their image. Most people they interact with are trying to grift them in some was as they are a publicly known high value mark. People value what they can get from them vs their personality. Over time they subconsciously under stand this, start to trust no one, and rely heavily on a circle of people who happen to be in reach who may still be grifting them. It is like they live in some artificial habitat on earth, supported by staff, not actually on earth.

Re: Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection

#263

Post by an0malous » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 4:58 PM UTC

ceejayoz wrote: post #35

an0malous wrote: post #18

He’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 busines…

> 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-... "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 At…

Andreesen and I are both talking about trends, not that literally no one thought of introspection or the immorality of slavery four hundred years ago

Re: Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection

#264

Post by TFYS » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 4:59 PM UTC

quantummagic wrote: post #125

thedima wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really like the way you put it: “It’s okay to be wrong. We’re all wrong from time to time. What’s not okay is not having a way to be corrected by the outside world for a specific reason: being at the top of the political pyramid, being ultra-wealthy and surrounded by flattery, etc"

You're right, but we've never devised any system that prevents this from happening. Every single organization leads to a concentration of wealth and power. And even those ideally conceived to have counterbalancing forces, eventually are corrupted and subverted. It seems to be the steady state of reality.

This will be the reality until we come up with a way to make good decisions using direct democracy, and make that decision-making process so fast and easy that it can be used for any kind of group decision.

Concentration of power stems from our inability to make good decisions as a group of equals. We have to choose someone to make decisions for the group because there is currently no other working way to make them. Current technology might enable us to find some form of true democracy, but I'm not sure if anyone is looking for it.

Re: Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection

#265

Post by cindyllm » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 5:00 PM UTC

general_reveal wrote: post #20

The 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 giv…

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Re: Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection

#266

Post by slopinthebag » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 5:00 PM UTC

Yes 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

Re: Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection

#267

Post by scottious » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 5:00 PM UTC

wodenokoto wrote: post #31

Is 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?

I remember when Elon came up with the hyper loop idea and everybody I worked with at the time thought it was revolutionary. These were very smart people who were fooled.

In hindsight, how could we all have fell for this? What a profoundly stupid idea, but I distinctly remember at the time it felt right.

I guess what I'm saying is that I think a lot of people just wised up and started seeing through his B.S.

Re: Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection

#268

Post by asdff » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 5:00 PM UTC

etchalon wrote: post #211

visarga wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In their minds, financial success is the ultimate yardstick. In a loopy recursive way, it is. Cost gates what we can do and become. Paying back your costs to extend your runway is the working principle behind biology, economy and technology. I am not saying rich people are always right, just that cost is not so irrelevant to everything else. I personally think cost satisfaction explains multiple levels, from biolog…

OK, but ... imagine Andreessen said, "I don't eat food." No one would think that was a reasonable position. No one would argue, "Well, food DOES have draw backs. What if you eat too much of it!" We all inherently understand that you have to eat food, and while being careful not to eat too much. We would understand that if anyone said, "Look at all these successful people who also didn't eat food!" that they were talk…

Are you kidding? People would eat that up if he said that. Soylent would sell like crazy. You'd see protein smoothie shops pop up all over the bay area. For better or worse there is a subset of people who just lap up at whatever comes out of these people's mouth.

Re: Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection

#269

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 5:01 PM UTC

simianwords wrote: post #234

I 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, t…

[deleted]

Re: Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection

#270

Post by shevy-java » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 5:02 PM UTC

So 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).

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).