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Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection

joanwestenberg.com

271–280 of 513 posts

Re: Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> The idea that rich people have something to say What is (or used to be?) implicit is that a person who has the means to be free of subsistence activities will/should take the time to *acquire a quality education and make an even better contribution to society and humanity. But what is evident is that the wealthy are rotting intellectually like much of the rest of society. And their brainrot has more impact because…

> What is (or used to be?) implicit is that a person who has the means to be free of subsistence activities will/should take the time to *acquire a quality education and make an even better contribution to society and humanity.

The rich got rich exactly by contributing to society and humanity. This is exactly what I mean by "rich people bad" local optima trap that you also seem to have fallen into.

Re: Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection

#272

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?

The question is what you think now of their old opinions. If you think the same, they have changed. If you think differently, you have changed.

If I look at Elon and Marc's interviews from 10-15 years ago I am still roughly 80% in agreement, 20% disagreement. I feel the same about what they used to say today, as I did back then.

Now I'm 20% in agreement (they definitely still have interesting thoughts) and 80% absolutely disgusted (with both, but particularly Musk).

So I genuinely think they changed in this regard.

Re: Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection

#273

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…

I feel like your comment is evidence that you are insufficiently acquainted with various flavors of cult-like behavior and wingnuttery. There are in fact people who sincerely believe that you don't have to eat [1], who believe it so fervently that they risk and sometimes lose their lives for that belief.

Humans are social creatures. We are biologically inclined to follow charismatic leaders, even off a cliff. In most people, the susceptibility to suggestion is much stronger than the strength of their rational beliefs. Just look at American politics, for example.

All of this is to say that if Andreessen said, "I don't eat food," there would be a small but vocal group who would see that as validation of their beliefs; there would be a think-piece in the Atlantic about the history of breatharianism; Hacker News comments about what does "food" mean, really, etc. Yes, people would take it seriously. Just because he's rich and has therefore bought a loud megaphone.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inedia

Re: Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection

#274

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.

I genuinely don't know how the mental model of such a person works where they look at Elon who got multiple world changing bets right but they focus on the ones that were wrong.

Re: Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection

#275
post #217
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just stupid, sociopathic. Definitionally.

You don't generally reach that level of wealth and success without at least having strong sociopathic (maybe even psychopathic) tendencies.

that's a stretch: andreessen got wealthy because he worked for the UIUC group in a project which turned out super popular, super funded by Jim Clark, and got massive explosion in worth. there's no sociopathy involved from him back then.

Musk made a company that jumpstarted some wealth and invested in other things which exploded.

Toto Wolff is a gazillionaire because he too made some pretty incredibly timed investments.

point is, extreme wealth results from some combination of work, timing luck, strategy, and sociopathy, but they're not all required to span the space of wealthy people.

Re: Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as ideas worth listening to, on any topic. Shoe Button Complex as coined by Buffet and Munger. I see this all the time from even mildly successful people. Suddenly the Early Bitcoin Adopter is now a Macro Economist and a Relationship Guru.

Also a product of the US stock market going up and to the right for the last couple of decades. It's very easy to convince yourself that you are some great perceptor of the world because you've been getting 30% CAGR on your portfolio for the last few many years. But in hindsight it was always more likely to be green than red, and you could handily beat the market average if you had any kind of tech tilt at all, which…

I very much agree with your first paragraph. But then to say you could just simply invest in "in any Stanford/Berkeley/MIT person who walked through your doors, it was impossible to end up in the red." is the kind of non-reflective and overly simplistic thinking you are criticizing.

Being a good investor takes skill. The vast majority of people who come from these schools couldn't get funded, and most still fail.

The majority of investors even in this boom also failed.

My meta point is that we seem to be losing nuance on both sides, and that is coming through on many of the messages here.

Re: Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection

#277
post #242

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…

I have yet to check the prediction markets for this proposition but I would bet on Peter Thiel being the first one to mistake a fancy cup for the Holy Grail.

Re: Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection

#278
post #237

This whole scenario is just the logical conclusion of American anti-intellectualism. The need for intellectuals doesn't really go away, but rather we start assuming that "good at making money" = "has ideas worth listening to, on any topic." Not really surprising that many of these people are also frequent critics of academia and professors.

goes both ways. elitism exists on both ends of the spectrum. the academic side is largely the same thing except it's attained from years of schooling through certain pedagogues that tout the one true way and if you haven't been through that wringer, then your understanding doesn't count. true intellectualism, has humility and the everlasting honest pursuit for truth. neither of these extremes have this quality.

No, I don't think it's the same thing at all. For many intellectual fields, I'd say having an academic degree (or a degree's equivalent of knowledge) in the subject is more-or-less required to have an intelligent, novel opinion on the subject.

It depends on the field, but just to use one that I'm familiar with, philosophy: everyone seems to think they have novel insights on philosophical issues, but unfortunately these opinions tend to be really, obviously wrong and half-baked when analyzed by actual philosophers.

Re: Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection

#279
I think this blog post doesn't quite understand Andreessen's position. In fact, perhaps Andreessen doesn't understand his own position, which makes this even worse.

Freud isn't the issue; Freud did not think the unconscious was "inside," he said the unconscious is the metapsychological apparatus which is the result of primary repression (something we all experience at a young age, since we don't remember, for instance, being potty trained, but we don't go around shitting ourselves, at least not intentionally). The ego is, at the most basic level, the skin. Its inside relatively to the outside, but there isn't a hidden subject hiding within it, you can and often do affect the inside of the body through external means, and vica versa.

It was Descartes who originally came up with the idea of a separate "inner" world vs a "outer" experience, the thinking ego-cogito and what it perceives in extension in the world. This formulation has been troublesome for philosophy hence, but in fact it was Freud (and not Heidegger) who succeeded, after a long line of attempts in the 19th century, in radicalizing the ego-cogito and decimated the notion of "inner experience" in the 20th century, which became key to the developments of both psychology and philosophy (hence the ironic reference to the Vienna circle). And more than Freud, in Andreesen's case, it was Nick Land, who took Freud even further, and expanded this idea to refer to unity in general,so that the 0, even that of the computer programming, the empty unity, became its own activity in a broader economy of information and energetics, and this 0 was both that of the psyche-soma, and that of the symbolic movement in computer logic. And that is what Andreesen is trying to refer to, but he is not very well read, of course, he spends most of his time working in tech but he reads this sort of thing and talks to a lot of people who are more well read than he is.

Re: Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Americans are weird creatures in this regard. Give them 5% of their compensation / 0.0001% of a company in stock/options and suddenly they think they have become Big Capital. If you need to work to collect a wage to pay your expenses, you are still labor, sorry if that hurts peoples feelings, but it shouldn't.

John Steinbeck: “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires”

Roughly 18% of US households have a net worth over 1 million, so to some extent, they really are.
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