In the late 1990s I went to a RealNetworks developer conference and Andreesen, then at Netscape, was a keynote speaker. I was curious and open to his insights, but his talk was so vapid (I remember he kept giggling) and arrogant that I eventually walked out. I remember he kept bragging about Netscape's next big project (something after Netscape 5 maybe?) and how it was going to wipe Microsoft out permanently. Only a few years later did I realize whatever it was never shipped, it turned out to be vaporware.
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.
This has always been the case with the massively wealthy. They may be incredibly smart in their specific line of business, which leads them to an enormous amount of wealth and fame. Because our culture likes to lionize success stories, we collectively lean hard into putting people like that on pedestals and giving them more opportunities to speak their minds. Their own egos get inflated as a result, and a feedback loop ensues - they think everything they do is great because, collectively, our culture wants everything they do to be great.
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.
There is a shift in society on what can be said and what they keep private. Back then you would pull stings in background, now you can bribe thenUS president in public.
Also: Back in the days™ statements where edited by marketing people and others before publication. Now people blast out stuff on their own via "social media"
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.
“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.”
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
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 think this blog post doesn't quite understand Andreessen's position. In fact, perhaps Andreessen doesn't understand his own position, which makes this even worse.
Freud isn't the issue; Freud did not think the unconscious was "inside," he said the unconscious is the metapsychological apparatus which is the result of primary repression (something we all experience at a young age, since we don't remember, for instance, being potty trained, but we don't go around shitting ourselves, at least not intentionally). The ego is, at the most basic level, the skin. Its inside relatively to the outside, but there isn't a hidden subject hiding within it, you can and often do affect the inside of the body through external means, and vica versa.
It was Descartes who originally came up with the idea of a separate "inner" world vs a "outer" experience, the thinking ego-cogito and what it perceives in extension in the world. This formulation has been troublesome for philosophy hence, but in fact it was Freud (and not Heidegger) who succeeded, after a long line of attempts in the 19th century, in radicalizing the ego-cogito and decimated the notion of "inner experience" in the 20th century, which became key to the developments of both psychology and philosophy (hence the ironic reference to the Vienna circle). And more than Freud, in Andreesen's case, it was Nick Land, who took Freud even further, and expanded this idea to refer to unity in general,so that the 0, even that of the computer programming, the empty unity, became its own activity in a broader economy of information and energetics, and this 0 was both that of the psyche-soma, and that of the symbolic movement in computer logic. And that is what Andreesen is trying to refer to, but he is not very well read, of course, he spends most of his time working in tech but he reads this sort of thing and talks to a lot of people who are more well read than he is.
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.
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.
I worked with Marc a very long time ago when he was just another nerd and he is the last man I would go to for advice on how to live life. I think if you go to Marc over, say, the Buddha for advice on how to live life you are probably not going to be rich like Marc - that was a lot more path dependency than philosophical inevitability - nor enlightened like the Buddha. You’ll just be an angry man boy that people generally can’t stand to be around.
I thought the best juxtaposition for Marc was when he would present before or after Jim Barksdale - who was in fact a man of extreme dynamism, a true leader, and quintessential entrepreneur. Marc in comparison was an awkward angry man boy that was as inspiring as a cucumber salad.
What Marc did that Jim didn’t was Marc took his wealth and distributed it randomly in various pump and dump schemes and managed to play odds pretty well. This enabled a lot of businesses to come about. Marc didn’t make them. He used his Netscape money to gamble well on them. Jim however actually built things, over and over, that pushed the limits of what man can do.
But I wouldn’t look to Jim on how to live a life worth living either. Buddha, Socrates, there’s thousands of years of well worn insight, and these guys just spend their energy and lives on other things. You would be a fool to listen to them. Learn their biography sure - they’re interesting. But they’re not insightful.
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.
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.
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.
> “His manifesto obsesses over abundance, over the elimination of material suffering, and a future in which technology has lifted constraints that currently limit human possibility. These are goals I can get behind. But "forward" presupposes that you know where you're going, and knowing where you're going presupposes that you know what you want”
Want we want is often in direct opposition to our flourishing.
I sincerely doubt a humanity without constraints will ever be fulfilled or happy. The more “free” we make ourselves the more miserable we seem to become.
Across cultures and history the things that limit our freedom the most are where humans find meaning. You cant have duty, responsibility, honor and also be full detached and unentangled. Nothing significant is not also (at times) burdensome.
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.
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.
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?
What Andreessen is hinting at, albeit still largely surface level, is 无心 or no mind.
Popular in martial arts and Buddhist philosophy, I think practically what you should take away is that body and mind are fundamentally intertwined.
Introspection is a practice of the mind, specifically cognition centered around portions of the brain like the prefrontal cortex. There’s a lot more to who you are and areas you can hone / cultivate.
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.
So I don't know the introspection comment to be able to make a judgement.
Personally I love introspection. You work with a black box, yes? With
introspection you have the ability to poke inside. That's useful. Is
this what Marc meant? Is there another form of introspection?
> Andreessen also said that the "great men of history didn't sit around doing this stuff."
Well, that's also wrong in research. Biological cells carry an internal description (DNA almost exclusively; there are some RNA viruses but all viruses require a cell as amplifier, and cells have DNA as their genome. RNA-based genomes are quite limited, largest ones are e. g. coronavirus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus).
People first had to decipher the respective genome to understand the "feature set" available here. That's also introspection if you think about it, and with synthetic biology we'll get even more here - so why would that be negative? It's awesome. Marc needs to read more books - his imagination is too limited. He is approaching Bill Gates "540kb is enough" saga (which he never said verbatim, but people like to attribute it to him ... or perhaps it was 640).
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.
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]
Weak article. It never really tries to reconstruct what Andreessen meant, just takes a narrow quote, reads it in the least charitable way, and then spends most of its energy tearing down that version with loaded rhetoric.
The comments only reinforce that impression: most are some variation of “rich guy, therefore idiot.” This is more pile-on than discussion.
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.
The author conflates anti introspection and post-introspection. Marc is not against introspection, he clearly identifies that a few hundred years ago introspection wasn't all that common. Marc clearly identifies as post-introspection in that there's something beyond just humans constantly looking inwards (which seems to be the Author's passtime).
There's a fine balance between contemplating what to do and focusing on doing - perhaps Andreesen thinks that the balance needs to be shifted righwards.
On the topic of Sigmund Freud: The author fails to understand that it takes a critical mass of people to develop functionalities for the society to meaningfully change. In the same way that Hinduism identified atheism multiple thousands of years ago, but that didn't bring any meaningful change in the society until the west brought modernism.
A lot of people become "stuck in their ways" as they get older. Marc saying this about introspection might be an example of it starting to happen to him. By definition, "being stuck in your own ways" is having a lack of introspection.
Impressive amount of coverage for rich guy says slightly dumb thing on a podcast. Here's the actual podcast bit for those interested https://youtu.be/qBVe3M2g_SA?t=57
He's asked why not introspective and says
>Yeah. I don't I don't know. 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.
which is fair enough, but then suggests that stuff started with Freud which is historically inaccurate but I mean he's a tech guy on a podcast, not a historian.
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...
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.
>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
I don’t think that if you read as much as Marc that you can do it without introspection. Correct me if wrong but you always pick up learnings and ideas which apply to your own life.
I do understand where he’s coming from. One of my forms of procrastination is reading my old notes and pondering and pretending I’m self-improving. But it’s actually a way to avoid action.
And I did learn that if you want to get somewhere, action is what gets you there. Not endless introspection.
I've been increasingly confident in my thought that these VCs and tech leaders are basically people who used other people's money to pull the arm on a hundred slot machines.
After they win a few times they start to think they're experts at slot machines, not just lucky.
Over time, they start to think they're also experts at other things, and because they have money people start to listen to them.
Unfortunately they just keep proving me right on this.
I think the nuance is between reflection and introspection (which I interpret as rumination)
Rumination is not specifically in effort to solve, but rather to continue to analyze, which can lead to the definition of insanity; doing the same thing but expecting a different result
That distinction empowers problem solving instead of spiraling. But this is my perpsective of Andreeson's statement
478 comments
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?
> Did I or did they change?
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.
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.
Also: Back in the days™ statements where edited by marketing people and others before publication. Now people blast out stuff on their own via "social media"
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/11/opinion/trump-musk-kanye-...
It seems to explain some of the weirdest of hang ups and strange / desperate choices.
You grew up.
- Teddy Roosevelt
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
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.
Freud isn't the issue; Freud did not think the unconscious was "inside," he said the unconscious is the metapsychological apparatus which is the result of primary repression (something we all experience at a young age, since we don't remember, for instance, being potty trained, but we don't go around shitting ourselves, at least not intentionally). The ego is, at the most basic level, the skin. Its inside relatively to the outside, but there isn't a hidden subject hiding within it, you can and often do affect the inside of the body through external means, and vica versa.
It was Descartes who originally came up with the idea of a separate "inner" world vs a "outer" experience, the thinking ego-cogito and what it perceives in extension in the world. This formulation has been troublesome for philosophy hence, but in fact it was Freud (and not Heidegger) who succeeded, after a long line of attempts in the 19th century, in radicalizing the ego-cogito and decimated the notion of "inner experience" in the 20th century, which became key to the developments of both psychology and philosophy (hence the ironic reference to the Vienna circle). And more than Freud, in Andreesen's case, it was Nick Land, who took Freud even further, and expanded this idea to refer to unity in general,so that the 0, even that of the computer programming, the empty unity, became its own activity in a broader economy of information and energetics, and this 0 was both that of the psyche-soma, and that of the symbolic movement in computer logic. And that is what Andreesen is trying to refer to, but he is not very well read, of course, he spends most of his time working in tech but he reads this sort of thing and talks to a lot of people who are more well read than he is.
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.
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.
I thought the best juxtaposition for Marc was when he would present before or after Jim Barksdale - who was in fact a man of extreme dynamism, a true leader, and quintessential entrepreneur. Marc in comparison was an awkward angry man boy that was as inspiring as a cucumber salad.
What Marc did that Jim didn’t was Marc took his wealth and distributed it randomly in various pump and dump schemes and managed to play odds pretty well. This enabled a lot of businesses to come about. Marc didn’t make them. He used his Netscape money to gamble well on them. Jim however actually built things, over and over, that pushed the limits of what man can do.
But I wouldn’t look to Jim on how to live a life worth living either. Buddha, Socrates, there’s thousands of years of well worn insight, and these guys just spend their energy and lives on other things. You would be a fool to listen to them. Learn their biography sure - they’re interesting. But they’re not insightful.
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.
> “His manifesto obsesses over abundance, over the elimination of material suffering, and a future in which technology has lifted constraints that currently limit human possibility. These are goals I can get behind. But "forward" presupposes that you know where you're going, and knowing where you're going presupposes that you know what you want”
Want we want is often in direct opposition to our flourishing.
I sincerely doubt a humanity without constraints will ever be fulfilled or happy. The more “free” we make ourselves the more miserable we seem to become.
Across cultures and history the things that limit our freedom the most are where humans find meaning. You cant have duty, responsibility, honor and also be full detached and unentangled. Nothing significant is not also (at times) burdensome.
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.
“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.”
Popular in martial arts and Buddhist philosophy, I think practically what you should take away is that body and mind are fundamentally intertwined.
Introspection is a practice of the mind, specifically cognition centered around portions of the brain like the prefrontal cortex. There’s a lot more to who you are and areas you can hone / cultivate.
The HN crowd is probably overweighted on cognition, and could do with spending more time in other areas: https://www.cheltenhamzen.co.uk/writings/gut-instinct
Personally I love introspection. You work with a black box, yes? With introspection you have the ability to poke inside. That's useful. Is this what Marc meant? Is there another form of introspection?
> Andreessen also said that the "great men of history didn't sit around doing this stuff."
Well, that's also wrong in research. Biological cells carry an internal description (DNA almost exclusively; there are some RNA viruses but all viruses require a cell as amplifier, and cells have DNA as their genome. RNA-based genomes are quite limited, largest ones are e. g. coronavirus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus).
People first had to decipher the respective genome to understand the "feature set" available here. That's also introspection if you think about it, and with synthetic biology we'll get even more here - so why would that be negative? It's awesome. Marc needs to read more books - his imagination is too limited. He is approaching Bill Gates "540kb is enough" saga (which he never said verbatim, but people like to attribute it to him ... or perhaps it was 640).
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.
"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
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther
The comments only reinforce that impression: most are some variation of “rich guy, therefore idiot.” This is more pile-on than discussion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_thyself
There's a fine balance between contemplating what to do and focusing on doing - perhaps Andreesen thinks that the balance needs to be shifted righwards.
On the topic of Sigmund Freud: The author fails to understand that it takes a critical mass of people to develop functionalities for the society to meaningfully change. In the same way that Hinduism identified atheism multiple thousands of years ago, but that didn't bring any meaningful change in the society until the west brought modernism.
He's asked why not introspective and says
>Yeah. I don't I don't know. 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.
which is fair enough, but then suggests that stuff started with Freud which is historically inaccurate but I mean he's a tech guy on a podcast, not a historian.
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...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_thyself
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 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...
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“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.
>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
I do understand where he’s coming from. One of my forms of procrastination is reading my old notes and pondering and pretending I’m self-improving. But it’s actually a way to avoid action.
And I did learn that if you want to get somewhere, action is what gets you there. Not endless introspection.
After they win a few times they start to think they're experts at slot machines, not just lucky.
Over time, they start to think they're also experts at other things, and because they have money people start to listen to them.
Unfortunately they just keep proving me right on this.
Rumination is not specifically in effort to solve, but rather to continue to analyze, which can lead to the definition of insanity; doing the same thing but expecting a different result
That distinction empowers problem solving instead of spiraling. But this is my perpsective of Andreeson's statement