Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does "eat the rich" actually mean besides a broad distaste of people who have more?
Consume their egregious wealth?
How would that work?
Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection
371–380 of 513 posts
Re: Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection
#372[dead]
Re: Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tim Dillon said summarized it pretty well - can't remember or find the exact quote. Something to the effect of: "Look around at all these things I have - how could I be wrong when I have so much?" And that's how you get the Andreessen's and Musk's of the world stating these nonsensical things as truth. In their minds, financial success is the ultimate yardstick. The fact that they have so much wealth is a testament t…
You say financial success as though it is completely independent of pretty much everything. "How could I be wrong, look how handsome I am" To create great wealth in a vibrant capitalist society you have to have some model about the world you can exploit. It can be a better rocket design, some insight into human psychology that can help you raise money, or something else. Some people fall ass backwards into money thro…
> Some people fall ass backwards into money through luck, but that's rare
You and I have vastly different mental models of the world. Or, at least, very different definitions of “luck”. For example, I would probably say that anyone who is rich through a “family business” has quite a bit of “luck” to thank (by my definition), except for the founder. And even then, the founder is usually “lucky” by connections (e.g. generous government contracts).
> and people with great wealth don't have that luxury because they would squander it away and won't be able to grow what they have been given
If I had to guess, it probably takes about an IQ of 90 to not lose generational wealth, unless there’s an addiction at play. Maybe even less.
Re: Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection
#374Is 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 believe in some form of the Twitter poisoning theory:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/11/opinion/trump-musk-kanye-...
It seems to explain some of the weirdest of hang ups and strange / desperate choices.
Re: Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection
#375Is 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?
They changed. You wouldn’t believe it but those most impacted by the mental rot that social media can induce - are the ultra wealthy.
I often wonder if tech billionaire psychosis might lead to a "Great Filter" event for our species. They have entirely unchecked power, lack of empathy, and gleeful ignorance of everything our species has done that their success rests upon.
Re: Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
People have been doing self-examination for a long time, but Freud's use of psychoanalysis is a fairly modern phenomenon and it's benefits are dubious. Modern therapy looks increasingly like pseudoscience. I expect biotech/AI advancements to make much of modern therapy irrelevant over time, as we obtain fine-grained control over the actual processes in the brain causing various afflictions.
modern therapy has nothing to with Freud, modern therapy approaches are empirically tested, and show efficacy comparable to medication, but sure other than that whole modern scientific approach... its definitely just pseudoscience the only pseudoscience you mentioned is the idea that mental "afflictions" are entirely biological
For sure Freud and modern therapy as practiced today are very different. Freud influenced the language, structure, and goals of talk therapy more than the exact methods most therapists use now. Modern therapy kept many of his clinical observations about inner conflict and relationships, but dropped or revised a lot of his more speculative theory.
Since mental illness or other trauma is entirely contained to the brain, you can in fact say that the problem is entirely biological. We are starting to see the tech industry make real inroads to biology. Neuralink, gene therapies, AI designed drugs, etc. All of these innovations will decrease the need for therapy, which at best you can say helps people learn to live with conditions, but never permanently fixes the problem.
Re: Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Tribal chiefs are not authoritarians? Because basically every Stone Age village has one.
A brief look at certain native American tribes might show quite a lot of talking and consensus building, like if some war chief wants a war he needs to drum up support for that. Hours of talking ensue! Not to say that ancient tribes didn't have the worst of what modern corporations have to offer as far as leadership goes, but a claim "basically every village" is basically wrong, or "bascially" is carrying a heck of a lot of weight.
Re: Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only because we don't allow ourselves to get serious until we hit like 25 years old imo, and only barely then. Imagine a 22 year old raised among Shaolin monks. Probably would be the wisest person you will ever meet.
I'm not sure. There's value from teachings, but there's a certain type of wisdom that only comes from lived experience. Kind of like in software development - a new grad can read Designing Data Intensive Systems and memorize all the answers for "design Facebook/Twitter/YouTube/etc." interview questions, but someone who actually built a platform with millions of users is going to have a different level of understandin…
All the more reason to start earlier, so you have more lived experience on the job by your mental peak at 22. Instead your lived experience is playing Halo or something like that by that point. Or wasting time flipping burgers. Wish I could have dumped all the hours I did in restaurant work in highschool into research. The door was shut though until I got into undergrad even though I was a hard worker and could have picked it up then. A lot of parallels between food service and lab work, I learned after the fact.
Re: Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reason he and Musk are anti-introspection is that when they do it, it hurts. Because they are terrible people. Better to just not think about it.
Yes. One of the most important things to learn is how to introspect and actually FEEL the pain that surfaces when you do. That's how healing begins. If you never do that, you're stuck in whatever destructive patterns you use to avoid that introspection forever. It turns out that when you actually allow yourself to feel those things, it gives your nervous system the ability to metabolize and process them.
I also think it is important to learn to feel and to separate the feeling from the acting on the feelings. In my mind this is what distinguishes an adult from a child. Sadly, I know many adults who have never learned this lesson (including members of my own family), so it's probably not a very good legal definition, although I like it as a practical one.
I sometimes encounter this phenomenon among college students in my job as a professor. Most college students have learned some form of it, but not all of them. I often think "somebody should teach them those skills" but it has always felt like it was out of scope for _me_ to be the one teaching them. I'm supposed to be teaching computer science. On the other hand, being unable to act rationally on stimulus is ultimately self-sabotaging, and will they be able to absorb my lessons if they can't get past little things like the way I look or the way I dress? This is not a hypothetical: any faculty member whose courses solicit end of semester feedback gets comments like "I didn't like his class because he seemed smug" or "I could not concentrate because I hated her accent" and nonsense like that.
Re: Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The rich got rich exactly by contributing to society and humanity. Pardon me, but this seems to be a local optima trap too.
The difference is, I know the extent to which this is true and where it fails. I don't think you even acknowledge this is largely true.
Is it true? Even on a small scale, when I taught kids how to swim for $20k/year I believe I did more for society than when I built systems to help a large streaming service deliver ads for $100k/year. There are certainly exceptions, but in general money comes from extracting value from others, while jobs that provide to society are not extractive and this pay less.