alt Hacker NewsMarc Andreessen is wrong about introspection
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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.
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.
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...
I guess even HN needs two minutes of hate. Andreessen is an easy target.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ignore all the techno bros on everything but their field of expertise.
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
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.
This notion that CEOs are geniuses is just patently false. They are average, and mostly distinguish themselves only in their arrogance and avarice. I would bet the IQ of the average HN reader to be higher than the average C-Suite exec.
He’s right in that business success is largely correlated with sociopathy, it helps you focus on the goal of maximizing your own wealth without worrying about the messy details of how other human beings are affected.
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.
> Marc Andreessen was right about web browsers.
> 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
What we're seeing is the culmination of these three ideas:
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.
It's nearly the same concept of move fast and break things... what happened to this forum.
congratulations
you are absolutely right, whilst having $0b in your accounts
First we had techno-oligarchs attacking empathy, now they are attacking introspection?
What's the endgame here?