Meditation was around way before Freud in eastern cultures. For once. Other cultures around the world had similar things about introspection. Just because his greedy ass doesn't want to face his own demons, he frames it as we don't need it
I do agree that too much introspection can be negative and that it's hard or even impossible to understand your decisions and motives until some time has passed.
> But he has since been wrong about a great many things.
This is true for almost all of the tech bros / influencers / CEOs. Being right once and getting rich does not make them smarter or better than anyone. Unfortunately our society doesn‘t view it that way - hence here we are, stuck with the Elons and Thiels of the world. And it‘s hurting us yet they’re on a pedestal
The ultra wealthy are very different from anyone else. First of all, their games is about power, everyone else's is survival and making the rent. Second they have armies of ass kissers. Third, they have no job and can even own politicians. And of course their wealth isolates them from repercursions anyone else would face, and puts their experience way out of phase with the regular people.
And we should also account for the sociopathic drive that made them rich in the first place (sociopaths are overrepresented in higher status positions).
The people that feel the need to be loud and in the public eye aren't necessarily playing 4d chess. It's really just an ego thing for them.
The wealthy who keep a low-profile are the smarter one's.
Technology truly can be used by the dispossessed in order to reclaim power from the billionaire psychopath class
But it requires those of us who know how to wield technology to stop looking to rich people to fund us, and start organizing from the ground up in order to take them down
Step one is that all of us blue collar technologists need to get organized
I’ve tried it and failed, but maybe now is the time
So that Apple and Google can discriminate against us as a bloc, instead of individually?
As a programmer I struggle to see how organization would achieve anything. We hold no cards, it's the platform holders who won.
Labor is entitled to all it creates.
Google and Microsoft employees already tolerate terrible software and immoral contract deals. It's not like you can count on them growing a conscience over working for an evil company.
there was a before the nlrb and there were unions then. would you expect union organizers for a tech workers union to be assassinated? would you expect members of a tech workers union to be gunned down en masse? if no, then the political landscape has been so much worse than now, and unions have managed to form.
If you believe you are incapable of actually doing anything then you are correct, and you should just go ahead and submit yourself to whatever power structure you think will benefit you the most
This leads me to believe that the power structures can't be fixed. There is no amount of protesting that can coerce private capital to take humanity's best interests to heart, that's simply the tragedy of the commons. There is no guerilla warfare you can wage on a totalitarian platform like iOS or Windows; you simply lose in the end, because you are malware and the OEM is always right.
Movements like GNU/FOSS win in the end because they don't even acknowledge the existence of corporate technology. They don't "fight" against anyone or make multi-billion dollar nemeses because it is a waste of volunteer hours that could go towards building something wonderful.
i advise against being so sure of your ideas. maybe you think platform holders have all the cards--test it. if they fight efforts to unionize, that tells a different story.
Better to just not think about it.
One of many, many, many stupid things he's said.
Musk slanders a cave diver trying to rescue trapped children as a paedo? No problem! The courts said it's fine. It's just a joke bro, you should be laughing.
Andreeson frontruns pump and dump shitcoins on retail investors via coinbase et al? Don't worry about it! Conning and scamming is fine now. The dog either eats or gets eaten.
We are far too kind to people being visibily obnoxious people because they are rich.
"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 that their way of thinking is always right.
You don't need to look very hard to see this is what they really believe. Elon has done extremely silly things like claiming he was the best Path of Exile player in the world because he paid several people grind his account to a high-level. Having enough money to pay someone to play the game for you, is the same as being good at the game, in his mind.
Only at least since the ancient Greeks has introspection been relevant (and even the Renaissance was well established by the 1600s):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_unexamined_life_is_not_wor...
>But he has since been wrong about a great many things.
Basically summarizes any billionaire. Society still seems to drink the kool-aid of billionaires. People think a guy has a billion dollars because he’s a genius. In all cases it was some small amount of intelligence with a whole lot of luck.
My hope is in the decades to come we wake up to the fact these guys are lucky wealth-hoarders and they get too much time on every podcast you can think of.
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 business needs.
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 Athens. His solution to his city’s strife was to cancel both public and private debts and end debt slavery."
> or that the environment will be irrecoverably destroyed if everyone pillages it for their own business needs
https://theconversation.com/the-waters-become-corrupt-the-ai...
Pliny the Elder: "We taint the rivers and the elements of nature, and the air itself, which is the main support of life, we turn into a medium for the destruction of life."
(The same is true for introspection. It's certainly not a modern invention. Andreessen asserts it's an 1800s/1900s invention, but Shakespeare's fucking famous for "to be or not to be, that is the question"!)
Thats catagorically wrong on both levels.
Common land was regulated and had a ton of bylaws to make sure that people didn't take the piss. There was lots of work done to improve the soil, (leaving fallow, crop rotation, fertilising, etc etc)
As for anti-slavery, there was a whole multi century effort to fight against surfdom.
The Quakers and other more radical religious types condemned it as unchristian,
The secular types also raged against it, thomas paine is most well known now, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Spence was also a key proponent.
I'm broadly sympathetic to the point in this article but it's trying to slip in literature and philosophy with honest first hand reports of introspection is underhanded. There's no reason to expect them to be any less guilty of motivated reasoning than Marc Andreesen
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 given you developers money. Fuck your Ping Pong table, fuck. Your. Ping. Pong. Table!”
Without introspection you'd just dive into the pit.
In order to go from reading the news to going outside and doing yardwork, you need to have a thought along the lines of "this doesn't feel good - I should do something else". That is introspection.
This isn't introspection.
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?
Also, power corrupts. That's a tale as old as time, I have found no evidence that somehow tech-bros are immune to it.
Their thinking didn’t change.
Sort of an oppositional defiant thing, filtered through immense wealth and power
"I've known you for all of 10 seconds and enjoyed not a single one of them" followed by blocking is good, actually. That doesn't make you any more correct or wrong, of course.
Wealth is not the only way this can happen, you see it with notoriety and power who have gotten used to " being right" (Dawkins comes to mind), and now this experience is being "democratised" by LLMs.
Being rich != being famous. There are tons of extremely wealthy people out there that keep a very low profile. Sure they might be well known within their circle but ask the average person and they have no clue who that person is. I would say this is the case for like 90-95% of billionaires.
Musk, Andreessen, Zuck and others were all in this camp 10 years ago but they all decided that simply being rich wasn't enough, they wanted to be famous. These folks have all the resources and connections to become famous so they can get on all the podcasts, write op-eds, and are guaranteed to get the best reach on social media and thus the most eyeballs on their content and the most attention paid to them.
But when you go from making a few media appearances a year to constantly making media appearances in one way or another is that you need more "content" so to speak. Just like a comedian needs more content if they are going to do a 1hr special versus a 10min set at a comedy club.
The problem for all these guys is they have a few genuinely insightful ideas mixed in with a ton of cooky and out of touch ideas. Before they could safely stick to the genuinely insightful ideas but as they've made more and more appearances, they have to reach for some of those other ideas. They don't realize that their cooky ideas sound very different than their few insightful ideas. They think all their ideas are insightful based on the feedback they have been getting for the past decade or so.
I tend to have a negative view of celebrities who did cameos for the Simpsons far past its peak lol
This is true of the same crowd on any topic, btw.
There are definitely some idiots with more money than sense, but reality tended to correct that fast. Now, it seems, they get rescued ( vide not that old case of Summers running to safe VC bank ).
I’d say both.
They ran out of novel things to say which is expected of anyone because there’s only so many non trivial things one could say. But then unlike normal people they didn’t stop talking because being rich they are bored and they want to be in the limelight all the time. So they end up talking nonsense.
You also changed, you are now wiser and have developed BS detector.
Why do they always feel like they need to pull stuff out of their butts to make themselves sound like they know what is going on? In some ways I think it's related to the stock market "just meet the next quarterly goal" kind of thinking. Who cares if you don't come up with something pithy to say for a few years. Have big impacts over time instead of tons of little ups and downs all the time.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/512029.Richistan
People are just finally able to see how dumb they are
I’ve seen this in action and in person multiple times and it’s absolutely fucking horrifying watching how ignorant, useless and totally out of touch with reality the Rich are , yet still can crush people via the police state whenever they want
Chris Hedges did a good video on this recently: https://youtu.be/EJ-OSJ7J64w
I don't think this is new though, Henry Ford was famously into anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and even owned a newspaper to spread hateful nonsense (history might not repeat itself but it apparently does rhyme). I'm sure if there was more recordings of robber barons of the past you would see the same dumb nonsense you see now.
Before social media started running society off the rails people like this would generally hold back their controversial opinions to avoid alienating a chunk of the public.
Now they realize they can say whatever they want and the 40% of people that glaze them for it are worth more to their ego than the downside of alienating everyone else.
Media consolidation has really helped weird billionaires move the Overton window, so that their weird/bad takes become "acceptable", and then they start admitting them publicly.
This won't have the effect they hope for. It'll just expose them as the frauds they are.
But the simple fact is, nobody's a genius in all areas. We all have our areas of expertise, but none of us can be trusted to speak wisely about all things all the time.
At the same time, as others have said, your BS detector has matured.
This creates an echo chamber where you don’t get reality checks, and when you do they’re easy to brush off as some form of “sour grapes,” after all if the person telling you that you’re wrong was so great they’d have your level of wealth.
I think it takes a really extraordinary person to avoid this. As far as I can tell, most of the modern Silicon Valley titans are not extraordinary in this respect.
Maybe the current AI landscape is a symptom of that mentality - that everyone should just pour as much money and resources into it, never look back, never measure, just keep pushing forward. If you start asking questions, you're in doubt. If you're in doubt, you're a roadblock for progression.
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.
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 many of these people naturally did.
Fawning over wealthy people has been happening for far, far longer than America has been around. This problem is by no means new at all.
My parents told me story about their trip to the US. They went on a boat tour in Miami and when the boat passed the homes of some rich people, the tour guide proudly announced the price of each building. The US tourists on the bus applauded! My parents were shocked.
It almost feels to me like acting as though a famous person being gasp wrong about something is implicitly suggesting that this is somehow surprising?
We should be surprised and write essays when the smartest people we know say something silly. Just because somebody's bank account has some zeroes in it doesn't mean it should be worthy of our focus.
The rich dude saying the stupid thing was platformed. This is defense.
It's not like they don't have a right to an opinion, but it's usually outsized, aggrandized nonsense.
Rare Book + Ego + a few thoughts on a long walk = Insufferable Twitter Nonsense
It's easy to have a zero-introspection mindset if the consequences of having zero introspection are absorbed by the many zeroes on Andreessen's bank account.
So congratulations, you are a fool
- Teddy Roosevelt
Write better sentences, please!
Billionaires are modern day monarchs, divorced from the experience of hoi polloi. I don’t say this (in this present moment) out of simple complaint or sloganeering, though both are easily applied. The argument I’m making is that gaining and/or living with sufficiently ludicrous wealth—orders of magnitude beyond what most of us plebs would retire on—leads _inextricably_ to living a life that is so utterly different that people lose completely the understanding of what the majority of the population actually does with their days. It almost doesn’t matter if the person who gains this level of wealth was “good” or “bad” or whatever qualifier you want to apply.
This isn’t a new or a fresh take. It’s a tale as old as…well, I’m comparing to monarchy. But it bears restating, because the folks that are empowered to make sweeping changes to the systems that we all live under cannot actually relate to what most of those changes feel like. This is less of an individual moral failing than a structural one—though when the structure is being driven by the selfsame individuals, I guess there’s plenty of blame to go around.
It isn’t so surprising that someone raised with generational wealth would have such blinders—and in fact I find that fairly forgivable on the individual basis, though damning of the system that allows that to happen while there’s still people unhoused and unfed.
Perhaps more surprising (and maybe serving as a warning to the rest of us) is that it’s visibly possible to have and to then lose that perspective and ability to relate. This is most visible with folks whose public work precedes their extreme wealth. Jerry Seinfeld still writes comedy—but it doesn’t hit like his earlier works, since there isn’t a shared reality. Our own Paul Graham’s earlier essays have aged, but a fair number of them still ring true; his more recent works barely make a blip here, and with reason.
Marc Andreessen might be right for himself. Or he might be dead wrong. But his advice and writings are effectively useless to the rest of us either way. There’s no shared “there” there.
1. Prosperity theology [1]. This idea took hold in early Protestantism. Even if you're not religious, it's had an undeniable impact on the West (including the so-called "Protestant work ethic"). The idea is that you are essentially blsssed by God if you are rich. This was a huge departure from Catholic dogma. If Jesus was real and came back in Texas today he'd get hung at a Communist terrorist;
2. The myth of meritocracy. This is a core tenet of capitalism that the wealthy are that way because they deserve to be; and
#. In the US in particular, hyper-individualism. Specifically, the destruction of any kinf of collectivism. This shields people from the impacts of their actions and any kind of accountability.
People who find success tend to get high on their own supply and they have no one around them to correct their behavior. Instead they have a cadre of slavishly sycophantic yes men.
There's a common refrain that it takes three generations to go from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves. The vast majority of fortunes are lost, or at least significantly reduced, within 3 generations because the later generations get surrounded by the same yes men and have no idea what it takes to maintain let alone make a fortune. There's really no hope for any form of introspection, accountability or growth.
I'm old enough to remember the Netscape saga. I remember feeling kind of sorry for Marc Andressen who got kinda screwed by the whole netscape deal. By "screwed" I mean he ended up with ~$50M (IIRC) on a deal worth billions. I also remember how the other tech titans of the era were at least ostensibly anti-establishment rebels. "Tech hippies" in a way.
I really wonder what those people would think of the likes of Andressen, Musk, Bezos, Ballmer, Gates, Thiel, etc. All those are objectively awful people who kowtow to the American administration and have essentially just become military contractors who uphold awful ideas like "transhumanism" (which is just eugenics).
But is he wrong? Our company culture rewards psychopaths and sociopaths because they have no conscience. In a way, there's no accountability without a conscience. So it might be a successful strategy in business but it is objectively making the world a worse place. And that ultimately ends with heads on spikes.
So now they spout their mouth off and the media hangs on their every word and debates it.
Those who act would do well to think a bit more, and those who think a lot need help taking action.
I recently launched an app that can help in either case (Wiseday on the app store.)
It lets you print a daily page that can both be used to introspect, as well as an execution aid to help you actually take consistent action towards your goals.
you are absolutely right, whilst having $0b in your accounts
Actually, what about web browsers was he right about?
I have watched these people expend literally years getting into hypothetical arguments with strawmen they believe are active participants in their community when, at best, they are occasional lurkers, and will erect entire superstructures of theory and belief that make utterly no sense to those outside of their rationalist cult.
Lesswrong and motteizen type users fall squarely into this category, who also tend to cleave towards the pro-AI side of the spectrum now that, as with the rest of their lives, they are able to delegate the production of logorrhea at scale to the machine.
These people are mentally unwell, and reading their proclamations is not too dissimilar to browsing a deep web trans community discussing esoteric gender theory, or even merely the slashdot comment section in 2016 - just with an extra ten paragraphs of fluff and vapidity as if they had been fed on a steady diet of the New Yorker.
seydor•1h ago
lenerdenator•1h ago
Redefining competence and intelligence as "ability to make money" has done untold damage to American society.
Sl1mb0•54m ago
A small group of colonies managed to win a war against what was considered at one point the globe's strongest empire. Throughout the history-narrative of America there is a prevailing sense that the underdog can always overcome their circumstances and win the day. That most Americans (myself included) have a semi-deluded sense that they "can achieve anything they put their minds to" is a direct manifestation of that narrative-history. It's also why there is so much rampant anti-intellectualism here; think about it, if you can do and are capable of anything - why would you *ever* listen to an expert's opinion? It's also why libertarian-ism is so popular; why would you want the rest of society dragging you down when you yourself are capable of so much more?
I want to be clear as well, there *are* benefits to the can-do attitude, but at this point I think the cons outweigh the pros, and we are seeing that play out in American society. I'd also like to acknowledge that the current situation is the result of many different factors; but that this one is largely overlooked due to the assumption that it's positives outweigh it's negatives.
a456463•44m ago
hencq•30m ago
It appears to come with a lot of corruption and anti-intellectualism. Like you say there are also benefits to this. I think the break through of mRNA vaccines was an early indicator. I just hope we can steer this attitude back to a more optimistic world-view instead of the blatant self serving one that is currently prevailing.
mlinhares•1h ago
xhkkffbf•28m ago
andsoitis•55m ago
but were they, as a whole, ever wise?
duped•41m ago