alt Hacker NewsMarc Andreessen is wrong about introspection
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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?
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.
Im so glad someone wrote this. I was literally ranting out loud to myself at the gym the other day on the treadmill about how dangerous this meme of "I have no introspection, therefore I am Leet" is. He knows it's provocative, and knows its therefore memetic. You hear the other person on the podcast turning it over in his head and going "yeah, maybe I too also don't have any introspection...yeah!". Such a strong potential for abuse.
Mark Andreessen is the manifstation of "fooled by randomness". An idiot that got lucky, now thinks he is a god.
What does this uneducated greedy clown know about anything? He just happened to be born in 1955 US in a time of money.
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
“It tires me to talk to rich men. You expect a man of millions, the head of a great industry, to be a man worth hearing; but as a rule they don't know anything outside their own business.”
- Teddy Roosevelt
I was reading Martin Luther's wiki article the other day:
"Johann von Staupitz, his superior and frustrated confessor, concluded that Luther needed more work to distract him from excessive introspection and ordered him to pursue an academic career" [1]
basically he was a moody college student
I think introspection can sometimes turn into rumination: obsessively remembering and reliving past mistakes. It is the latter that is harmful to people, but particularly founders.
This is especially true if you believe your mistakes are due to an internal flaw, because then you can't even learn from them. If you believe you are too damaged to be a good leader, then you will never lead.
I confess that I'm pretty good at letting go of my own mistakes. I can somehow learn from them without blaming myself for making them. That means I'm able to make a lot of mistakes without taking emotional damage. And that lets me try new things without fear.
Does that mean I'm less introspective than the average person? I don't think so, but I don't know.
I'm curious how Andreessen came to this motto. Introspection is just a feedback loop, where you evaluate your actions, and adjust for when going forward. Not too unlike a control loop.
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.
It's a shame, anyone who's dumb enough to believe Marc Andreessen, isn't going to be smart enough to read this article.
Of course he is. In fact in that same podcast Andreessen makes a point using historical evidence and what is history but collective introspection?
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.
> Host David Senra, apparently delighted, congratulated Andreessen on developing what he called a "zero-introspection mindset."
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.
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where–” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“–so long as I get SOMEWHERE,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”
I’m convinced that he meant rumination, not introspection. There’s simply no way to be “high agency” without some level of introspection. Rumination is essentially a kind of excessive introspection that leads to paralysis.
There's a balance to be had between introspection and taking action. People tend to have a bias for one or the other (action bias vs thinking bias.)
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.
Mark Andreessen is an idiot, a guy fooled by randomness.
This blog post and all the comments in response feel very tautological. I think Marc has a fairly simple point here, which is don't spend time dwelling on the past. Learn from the past, take away information about how things can be improved, but then make a plan (for whatever it is that you are building/doing) and move forward with that plan.
In the podcast, he basically lays out that the A16Z thesis is that there is not enough technology, information, and intelligence in the world, so they are going out and investing in companies/ideas that can make an impact in these areas. That requires learning from the past, but not dwelling on it. Seems like a very sensible and positive approach to me.
Andreessen is a virus ("Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Marc Andreessen") and has a virus' motivations: grow without thinking -- maybe the host dies, maybe it doesn't, but just grow.
I unfortunately see a lot of people take the low iq interpretation of a concept and critique it because the higher iq interpretation looks quite similar unless you have done the ground work.
“Rich people bad” is too easy a local optima to fall into and not escape.
As for the article: the author asks move forward to what? If the author had read more on what Marc really means by move forward and what direction means, they wouldn’t have asked this. Unfortunately, the low iq critique is easy so that’s what we end up with.
To be fair, Marc Andreessen is wrong about many things.
For me too much deep introspection does lead to depression. I am fully capable of diving into my navel, and it turns out to be a deep dark pit. Doing anything productive, or even just fun, is a cure for me. I often read the news, feel miserable about the state of the world, and then go outside and do yardwork, get my body in motion, and very soon feel much better about the world and my place in it. For me introspection isn't bad in itself, but binging on it is, as with food.
How does Marc Andreessen know that he has no introspection if the doesn't have introspection to evaluate whether he has introspection? How can he discuss his lack of introspection in a whole-ass interview about his lack of introspection if he lacks the introspection to evaluate his lack of introspection?
Certainly not the earliest example and can be interpreted in many ways but one of my favorite ancient examples of “introspection” is the phrase “Know Thyself” inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.
Andressen has demonstrated he is past his prime; he is no longer relevant. We should stop giving his opinions space.
Marc Andreessen is wrong about a lot of things.
No one knows what it means, but it's provocative… gets the people going!
Yes this is a stupid idea, but commentators are forgetting everyone has stupid ideas. I would imagine the vast majority of commentators in this thread hold one, like
- Socialism / Communism is a good idea - Functional or OOP programming is a good idea - LLM's will replace programmers - Languages like Javascript, Typescript, or Python are actually good and should be used
The list honestly goes on. The only difference is that Andreessen has a platform and we don't.
> Marc Andreessen was right about web browsers.
Actually, what about web browsers was he right about?
His statements about this were purely politics, and nothing more. He himself does not believe this. It's political revisionism.
>The only access anyone has to those questions is through something like introspection: either their own, or someone else’s honest reports of their experience, or the accumulated testimony of literature and philosophy...
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
A fair chunk of the population literally does not have an inner monologue. Genetics, maybe.
Perhaps Mark is one of those people, and simply lacks the capability to effectively introspect, and he's trying to turn that into a flex.
I think Andreessen's comments were borne of hyperbole and as a (deliberate) overcorrection against certain Bay Area rationalist types whose 10,000 word navel gazing screeds border on schizoidal personality disorder.
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; none of which has any correlation whatsoever to material sensate reality. No wonder there is such reverence for the hyperreality of LLM literary hallucination in these circles...
Sent from my iPhone
> Marc Andreessen was right about web browsers.
>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.
Counterpoint -- Yes he's wrong and obviously so. But is some rich dude saying something stupid worthy of platforming?
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.
Let me fix that for you. Marc Andreessen is wrong. There is the whole broken clock analogy though...
First we had techno-oligarchs attacking empathy, now they are attacking introspection?
What's the endgame here?
He has no soul. Many people don't.
He went so far as believing that those that tried to describe the contemplative nature such as Freud and Jung were conspiring. Contemplative nature is a scam!
Yes, most people around you are hollow, completely. Another pill is, someone's face is the he exact model of their most recurrent thought. An ugly, disgusting, punchable face reveals and ugly and disgusting set of thoughts.
Now you can spot the soulless, you're cursed.
I'm not sure he's entirely wrong.
I have a theory that a large fraction of the population is not conscious. They go about their lives, they still work and think and have emotions in some form, but they don't actually experience. In other words, they're P-zombies. (Note: I do NOT support any actual action based on this idea. This certainly doesn't suggest that it would be morally acceptable to do anything to that group that wouldn't be acceptable to do to the rest.)
This is by analogy to mental imagery. For a long time, there was a debate over whether people actually saw mental imagery in some real sense, or whether it was just a way of describing more symbolic thought. These days the general consensus seems to be that it varies, where someone might see extremely lifelike images, or more vague images, or none at all.
Since it's all about internal experience, people had a hard time understanding that their experience wasn't necessarily the same as everyone else's. The same might be true of consciousness.
This started out as mostly a joke or a thought experiment, but more and more I'm thinking it might actually be true. Statements like Andreessen's really push me in that direction. It's such a baffling statement... unless Andreessen is a P-zombie, then it makes perfect sense. And if he is, he probably thinks this whole consciousness idea is just a weird analogy for perception, and thinks we're a bunch of weirdos for acting like his statement isn't something obvious.
This whole debate is pretty weird and misguided, IMO. Marc Andreesen can be right about what works for him. Joan Westenberg can be right about what works for her. This would be obvious to a five year old. This whole brouhaha seems to be merely the setting for HN'ers (and everyone else) to continue their ongoing battles about how the world should and must be and why "the other side" is Wrong. Search through the comments here. Somehow Elon, Luigi Magnione, and Trump are pulled into the discussion.
Marc Andreessen has been too wealthy for too long, and has lost perspective.
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.
The problem with certain intellectual pursuits is that it becomes its own little sub culture with its own little sub culture celebrities.
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!”
Apparently Andreessen is an ignorant fool. Seems par for the course with these tech oligarch asshats.
Only at least since the ancient Greeks has introspection been relevant (and even the Renaissance was well established 400 years ago in the 1600s):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_unexamined_life_is_not_wor...
The problem is with the media pouring endless attention on these tech bros and bestowing the mantel of expertise in every field on them - philosophy, politics, religion, sociology.
So now they spout their mouth off and the media hangs on their every word and debates it.
Is this AI slop? In any case I hate writing that is "subject predicate object" that makes the whole article feel as obnoxious like a Twitter thread.
Write better sentences, please!
400 years ago black people and women weren’t considered equal to white men.
So congratulations, you are a fool
Not to put too fine a point on it, but if my head were shaped that way, I wouldn't want to look inside it either.
Marc Andreessen is wrong about many things that may be worth arguing against, but not here: this was completely idiotic take that doesn't deserve anything but contempt.
And it's not like you could convinced his followers that this take is wrong, anyone gullible enough to take such an insane take at face value is very unlikely to read your rebuttal.
We all know he’s wrong. The problem isn’t that he is wrong, it’s that we have elevated the wealthy into a status where they can be wrong, have no correction, and make decisions whole clothe which negatively affect the rest of us. All while being insulated from their negative world view.