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Marc Andreessen's dangerously unexamined life

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Re: Marc Andreessen's dangerously unexamined life

#41
post #22

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.

Re: Marc Andreessen's dangerously unexamined life

#42
post #39
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, the…

> 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…

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.

Re: Marc Andreessen's dangerously unexamined life

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

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

Re: Marc Andreessen's dangerously unexamined life

#44

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…

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.

Re: Marc Andreessen's dangerously unexamined life

#45
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

Re: Marc Andreessen's dangerously unexamined life

#46
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Marc Andreessen's dangerously unexamined life

#47
post #9

> 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.

The unexamined life is not worth living ~ 400 BC

I imagine Andreessen was kind of trolling?

Re: Marc Andreessen's dangerously unexamined life

#48
post #9

> 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.

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.

Re: Marc Andreessen's dangerously unexamined life

#49
"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."

Re: Marc Andreessen's dangerously unexamined life

#50
post #35

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 thr…

> 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 a…

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.
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