What everybody gets wrong about Andreesen is that Andreesen's origin story of being radicalized through business falls flat: his business partner is the son of notorious conservative pugilist David Horowitz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Horowitz
and I find it impossible to believe that he didn't get a big dose of ideology from that source.
"From 1956 to 1975, Horowitz was an outspoken adherent of the New Left. He later rejected progressive ideas and became a defender of neoconservatism. Horowitz recounted his ideological journey in a series of retrospective books, culminating with his 1996 memoir Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey."
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 and can centrally plan society with their superior intellect. Obviously.
Marxism/Leninism delivers that. So does hard-right nationalism and neoreactionary ideology. It's not a big jump. Basically it's a jump you make when you're either tired of losing (Marxism is not popular in the West) or you abandon nominal egalitarianism.
I said nominal egalitarianism because all authoritarian systems and political ideologies are inherently elitist. All authoritarian ideologies disregard the opinions of "lesser" people, who either don't matter (right-wing) or aren't smart enough to know what's good for them (left-wing).
I think this is the real basis of the "horseshoe theory." The horseshoe meets at the extremes because the extremes are authoritarian and they have that in common.
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 not a fan of the word "intelligent" as it's so meaningless on its own, yet it instantly evokes positive associations.
Dumb dumb is just dumb and ineffective. Smart dumb can do real damage.
I think you seeing him as radical is more a reflection of how radically left you are.
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 application of the
axiom, _Pretend to think well of yourself, and the world will think
well of you_, an axiom a hundred times more useful in society nowadays
than that of the Greeks, “Know thyself,” a knowledge for which, in our
days, we have substituted the less difficult and more advantageous
science of _knowing others_.
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.
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.
Most of our behaviors are a result of System I thinking and most of our moral rationalizations exist as System II thinking. It's extremely difficult to do what we feel is wrong so it's easier to intellectually synthesize a frame where we're morally correct than force ourselves to act against our possibly wrong intuitions.
1. https://home.csulb.edu/~cwallis/382/readings/482/nisbett%20s...
If anything, I think the lack of introspection is a mostly modern phenomenon.
~2 Corinthians 13:5~ Freud
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 a weakness and a scam. And if you think this is rude to say, I don’t because the palpable lack of empathy at the highest echelons of power (from POTUS down) is becoming a real liability for humanity as a whole given the amount of power they have amassed.
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
> 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)
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.
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.
>Marc Andreessen is a philosophical zombie
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47445593 (33 comments)
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.
0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBVe3M2g_SA
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
SmirkingRevenge•1h ago
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 he suggests.
It is of course, incredibly valuable - I think its basically the opposable thumb of the mind.
jrm4•1h ago
neilv•56m ago
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.
svnt•52m ago
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.
qlm•52m ago
An apt choice of words given the subject's unique blessing