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?
Maybe I am naive.
But if you go back and read it, you might notice that a lot of the companies and software he discussed and predictions along with them failed to be true or lasting.
I think mostly it was a good catchphrase.
To me, Musk crossed from "maverick" to "problematic" around 2018, when he tried to insert himself into the Thai cave rescue operation and ended up slinging accusations of pedophilia on Twitter.
At this point, he has unlocked many more specific adjectival achievements, and those are the ones that should be invoked whenever Musk's behavior is the topic. (Which it isn't here.)
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.
> decided that simply being rich wasn't enough, they wanted to be famous
While these are true, the real detail is that these people were never satisfied with being rich -- they wanted to be powerful. And influence is what makes one powerful. Being rich goes a certain distance: once you have f you money, the only thing worth buying to gain more power is fame.
They also truly believe they have all the right ideas, and the validation that comes from being platformed for a financial success (often right-place-right-time type luck, but sometimes combined with genuine skill or insight in a relevant field) hardens them to all criticism.
Not only that, but they clearly surround themselves with sycophants who always tell them they're absolutely right. Imagine what it's like to go 10 years without anyone having the guts to tell you you're wrong or your ideas are actually stupid. What would that do to your ego?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class:_A_Guide_Through_the_Ame...
Same for Andreessen, a VC's success is built on his ability to raise capital and pick winners. His whole strategy, like Musk, was also on building a public persona to raise capital and get people to believe in his picks.
Their thinking didn’t change.
Sort of an oppositional defiant thing, filtered through immense wealth and power
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.
"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.
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.
a) most people achieve social capital through relationships. Rich people gain it by distinguishing themselves among their already distinguished peers. Even if being obnoxious is what’s making you famous, you’re still more famous than anyone you know.
b) The cadre of rich people you’ve actually heard of self-select for craving attention and validation. Like most people, they aren’t good enough at anything to be famous organically, and like many of those people, are also insecure about their profound lack of specialness. But, few people have the money to buy the attention they crave.
Massive, unconstrained egos? They think they're hot shit, because they surround themselves with yes men.
I'm reminded of this:
> Beneath the grand narrative Musk tells, when he takes things over, what does he actually have the people under him do? What is the theory of action?
> He has people around him who are just enablers. All these Silicon Valley people do. All his minions. And they are minions — they’re all lesser than he is in some fashion, and they all look up to him. They’re typically younger. They laugh at his jokes. Sometimes when he apologizes for a joke, which is not very often, he’ll say that the people around him thought it was funny.
> When he was being interviewed at Code Conference once, he had a couple of them there. He told a really bad joke, and they all went like: Ha-ha-ha-ha. And I was like: That’s not funny — I’m sorry, did I miss the joke? And they looked at me like I had three heads. (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/07/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...)
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 doesn't just apply to the wealthy, but more lowly people too: see "Engineer's disease."
People like Musk and Adreessen are getting hit by a double-whammy: they're software engineers (the stupidest and most arrogant class of engineers) AND they're massively wealthy.
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"
Given the massive string of lies he spun about "full self driving" over the last decade or more, I don't think so.
Even before his recent political turn when he got widely vilified, I didn't trust him because of his record.
Same with Musk and the stock market. At some point, victim-blaming may be the only rational explanation left. His followers are rubes falling for a fraud, yes, but it can hardly be considered involuntary or exploitative at this point. The rubes have become rich simply by sticking together under Musk's benevolent gaze, dominating financial discourse in the broader market. It will continue to work for them, right up until it doesn't.
I tend to have a negative view of celebrities who did cameos for the Simpsons far past its peak lol
Would be great if we didn't spend so much time faffing in school on stupid stuff and got into our strides in our career maybe 5-10 years earlier. When I think about my first research job, that could have probably been done in middle school vs undergrad. Wasn't really any more challenging than when I worked part time in a restaurant in terms of the tasks. I probably could have been working on some thesis under an advisor for my hs years instead of being stretched thin over the boilerplate curriculum. And then I probably could enter the workforce at 18 and have enough to get up to speed on the job pretty fast. By 22 I'd be in management right at the peak of my mental faculties and skill buildup.
Ah, but peak wisdom? Much later.
I'm not saying go into the cave and toil. You would still do all the stuff you do socially. Just your academic and professional subject matter would be tailored like it is when you reach undergrad and drop certain subjects in favor of your specialty. You still socialize a ton as a researcher in undergrad and grad school and beyond. Research is very much a collaborative effort too, unlike a lot of jobs or academic learning up to that point. That being said I don't think some magic threshold is reached with that when you reach 32 vs 22. Some people famously lack any social skills all their life. Some people are socialable straight out of the womb. This isn't a linear process.
I can tell you from experience that 22 year old people are generally lacking in wisdom. A few of them have a little bit, but overall 22 year olds are just as stupid as teenagers.
Most people don't have much wisdom by age 22. They do have plenty of hubris though.
If we're speaking about mental capabilities, there's nothing that I could do at 22 that I can't do now being over 50. If anything my wisdom gained from experience makes me more valuable and capable now. Everything you learn makes you stronger, and 22 year olds have not learned much by age 22.
Again, just kind of sucks that you finally hit your stride in your career right as you feel your body and faculties declining with age. I don't think we get senile as soon as people notice you are definitely senile. I think it is a constant slide.
You grew up.
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.
A healthy, rational society would be much harder to bamboozle -- by Russians or demagogues or preachers or billionaires or anyone else -- than Americans have proven to be. Over the last 10-20 years, many events that I thought would serve to immunize us to BS have fed an addiction instead.
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.
Yep, and he claimed that he would colonize Mars soon.
In hindsight, how could we all have fell for this? What a profoundly stupid idea, but I distinctly remember at the time it felt right.
I guess what I'm saying is that I think a lot of people just wised up and started seeing through his B.S.
But the people who focus on his successes always seem to downplay, blame-shift and defend when it comes to his negative side. They'll never admit he was wrong about anything. It's the same worship / cult of personality that affects politics too.
Starlink + reusable rockets... alright, not bad, but not exactly a "world changing bet". Seems far more hyped than anything. So he gets credit for just combining the idea of reusable rockets to send satellites into space? okay fine.
He had a lot of money and threw a lot at the wall to see what stuck. If I were a betting man, I'd bet against his "next big idea". He'll over-promise and under-deliver.
The biggest of Musk's warning signs, for me, was the hype. Hype can drown out valid criticism. When the hype is big enough, valid criticism ends up being drowned out by rage based, critical rhetoric that's in a screaming match with proponents.
(The worst part about being hype averse is that I can end up averse to legitimately exciting things.)
It's funny you mention that because I remember at the time of HyperLoop somebody said "what about just ... trains?" and we all scoffed at it as if trains were some outdated technology
Let's just say I'm on team trains now.
We would have been much better off with investment in tried-and-true boring old trains.
Another factor seems to be the way corporate valuations have become increasingly untethered from actual value. It’s not like there isn’t historical precedent for people getting rich by luck but thinking they’re geniuses, but the tech world has become really weird about that in ways which amplify the previous no-filter point: it’s one thing to be, say, a Netscape millionaire but parlaying that into billionaire status really gets into the point where they never have to hear unwanted criticism and are guaranteed to be treated as sources of wisdom regardless of the applicability of their experience.
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 ).
It’s amazing how often becoming rich makes one into a libertarian :)
If I look at Elon and Marc's interviews from 10-15 years ago I am still roughly 80% in agreement, 20% disagreement. I feel the same about what they used to say today, as I did back then.
Now I'm 20% in agreement (they definitely still have interesting thoughts) and 80% absolutely disgusted (with both, but particularly Musk).
So I genuinely think they changed in this regard.
> So I genuinely think they changed in this regard
Everyone has changed. You, me, Musk, Andreesen. But in that time, the disparity between them and "us" in wealth and even more importantly, political power, has ballooned. Their increasing power has fueled their sense of infallibility and inevitability.
It's not yet clear what these changes will engender in us. We are more numerous and divergent in perspectives and interests.
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.
>>Andreessen and his cronies are making large claims about what human beings want and need.
Could very well be a moving target according to what they need from human beings at the time.
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.
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.
But Elon Musk has 850 billion dollars. That's 850,000,000,000$. An amount so mind-boggingly impossible to imagine that you need analogies such as these https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c96F7D57CzI. And these people got it not as a CEO of a quiet car company or such, but as owners of media and tech empires with a reach and influence Ted Turner could only dream about. It's a qualitative leap.
Also, power corrupts. That's a tale as old as time, I have found no evidence that somehow tech-bros are immune to it.
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
The moment the ultra wealthy slip up - that they reveal that they're a normal shitty person with a severe case of affluenza - the illusion shatters. And social media has made it both very easy and addictive for rich people to indulge in their worst vices. So now instead of fundamentally soulless people engaging in virtue signalling to pretend to be human, you have fundamentally soulless people engaging in vice signalling, because suddenly these p-zombies been given access to a machine that finds them fellow p-zombies to validate themselves with.
Furthermore, once you see this happen a few times, your mental default changes. Now you assume every wealthy person is an asshole until proven otherwise. Even if Elon Musk might be saying something poignant about space travel or AI safety, you've seen enough Cybertrucks and "X Æ A-12"s and "autistic" Nazi salutes to know that he's a moron. You, personally, were ignoring the latter to focus on the former, because you were probably smarter than him. But he's shoved the latter in your face to the point where it's undeniable.
> Did I grow up and they changed to a younger audience and what I used to enjoy was just a different kind of stupid?
No, you're thinking of MAD Magazine. Notably, it's still possible for an emotionally mature adult to still enjoy that kind of humor. But emotionally mature adults tend to not enjoy manchildren.
[0] 10 years ago was 2016, which is probably not as far back as you were thinking.
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. This applies to private equity too. I think a lot of mediocre tech VCs ended up with green books because the tide was just rising so fast; if you invested in any Stanford/Berkeley/MIT person who walked through your doors, it was impossible to end up in the red.
Being a good investor takes skill. The vast majority of people who come from these schools couldn't get funded, and most still fail.
The majority of investors even in this boom also failed.
My meta point is that we seem to be losing nuance on both sides, and that is coming through on many of the messages here.
What is (or used to be?) implicit is that a person who has the means to be free of subsistence activities will/should take the time to *acquire a quality education and make an even better contribution to society and humanity.
But what is evident is that the wealthy are rotting intellectually like much of the rest of society. And their brainrot has more impact because they are among the wealthiest people who have ever lived.
The rich got rich exactly by contributing to society and humanity. This is exactly what I mean by "rich people bad" local optima trap that you also seem to have fallen into.
Pardon me, but this seems to be a local optima trap too.
When he gets a payout by suing the government and then directing the government to pay him, how is hie contributing to society and humanity?
Heck, a large portion of my wealth came from buying ETFs and watching the number go up. How did I contribute to society and humanity to achieve that?
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.
Personally, every time I approach an unfamiliar domain I’m shocked by its depth and sophistication, seemingly only made possible by hundreds of thousands of hours given by passionate and intelligent people. Where there are parallels of concepts between domains, there’s often also highly specialized language formed around the exceptions that separate the two (e.g. applications of signal processing in different domains).
> true intellectualism, has humility and the everlasting honest pursuit for truth
True intellectualism recognizes the value of institutions and the models and frameworks of organized thought that they produce. For every Ramanujan, there are millions of Terrence Howards.
there's a lot of asterisks I left out of my initial comment. I think there's a lot to elaborate on. but the shortest version I can state is -- STEM fields suffer from it a lot less where there is a lot of measurable "truth." I think people are jumping on these comments protecting academia (which is fine) but the large point is that academia also suffers from the same effects of which those they look down on
It depends on the field, but just to use one that I'm familiar with, philosophy: everyone seems to think they have novel insights on philosophical issues, but unfortunately these opinions tend to be really, obviously wrong and half-baked when analyzed by actual philosophers.
I think there's a lot of irony and my point being further proven within this sentence
Kind of proving his point a little
Even then I’m not really claiming that academic philosophers are always right and amateur ones always wrong. Rather that amateur philosophers tend to make glaring mistakes that those educated in academic philosophy can easily see.
I've heard of stories of posters at conferences getting tossed out because a single "important" person on the conference committee had a problem with the author's advisor.
All that being said I don't think the rate of assholism is any different from the rate among the general population. Quite the opposite. Most of us look at those Nature moonshot labs in our depts as something of a cult lacking any semblance of work-life balance. We find most of our most compelling papers and examples of great science are not in CNS publications, but in journals niche to our field with single digit impact factors. A big part of that is reviewers for niche journals are able to actually understand the work and give a better review.
> “I am writing this letter to communicate our IMMENSE objection to the creation of multifamily overlay zones in Atherton,” the two wrote in their email, signed by both, as reported by The Atlantic’s Jerusalem Demsas. “Please IMMEDIATELY REMOVE all multifamily overlay zoning projects from the Housing Element which will be submitted to the state in July. They will MASSIVELY decrease our home values, the quality of life of ourselves and our neighbors and IMMENSELY increase the noise pollution and traffic.” [0]
Pointing out hypocrisy is easy and not necessarily damning. But looking at all the -100 for everyone but +2 for me fabric of society abusing startups he funds I can't help but think he is a pretty whack person. Let's stop listening to him.
[0] https://fortune.com/2022/08/06/marc-andreessen-billionaire-n...
- 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
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.
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 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.
Redefining competence and intelligence as "ability to make money" has done untold damage to American society.
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 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 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.
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.
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 was recently reading a post about how the Claude Code leak and Boris Cherny had the following to say..
"Mistakes happen. As a team, the important thing is to recognize it’s never an individuals’s fault — it’s the process, the culture, or the infra.
In this case, there was a manual deploy step that should have been better automated. Our team has made a few improvements to the automation for next time, a couple more on the way."
When complex systems fail often there is more than one thing that went wrong. Uncovering what those things are is important, so that you can address them and prevent them from happening again. Once fixed, it is on to the next task and no need to dwell on the past.
the only pseudoscience you mentioned is the idea that mental "afflictions" are entirely biological
Since mental illness or other trauma is entirely contained to the brain, you can in fact say that the problem is entirely biological. We are starting to see the tech industry make real inroads to biology. Neuralink, gene therapies, AI designed drugs, etc. All of these innovations will decrease the need for therapy, which at best you can say helps people learn to live with conditions, but never permanently fixes the problem.
Doesn't really matter when most of the results are unreproducible.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
"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
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.
Marcus Aurelius, Napoleon, Lincoln, the founding fathers, and a long slate of writers and philosophers would like a word
Society only meaningfully changes when a critical mass of people understand and apply a concept - in this case introspection.
Early death, however, was common. What's your point?
> Marc is not against introspection
One of the people cited spoke of a "zero-introspection mindset." That wasn't Andriessen, but it's rather clear.
I wrote my point clearly: not enough of the society had an introspective mindset for society to be meaningfully influenced by 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.
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 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.
Edit: the comment above said 'zero of everything', but it was edited.
“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.
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
Nonetheless you need to understand the dark and less visited corners of the mental landscape whence these ideas and his (putative) target audiences were borne (Bay Area rationalism), and the strategic nature of this communication which is more intended to send a message to certain sects rather than reveal anything genuine about himself or others.
At these echelons communication takes on a different character. You must understand if you speak at this level.
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
“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.”
The comments only reinforce that impression: most are some variation of “rich guy, therefore idiot.” This is more pile-on than discussion.
EDIT: From checking in with Claude about his talk.
> So the thing he was arguing against was specifically what he sees as a modern therapeutic culture — the expectation that people should examine their motives, feel guilty about their actions, and look backward. He wasn't framing it as a philosophical position so much as a practical one about founder effectiveness.
https://claude.ai/share/9c5611f7-fd0e-4f76-bd39-e1129c035a4f
Actually, what about web browsers was he right about?
>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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Write better sentences, please!
What's the endgame here?
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...
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!”
So now they spout their mouth off and the media hangs on their every word and debates it.
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.
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
- 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 - CLI apps are better than GUI apps - Spaces are better than tabs - Religion is stupid
The list honestly goes on. The only difference is that Andreessen has a platform and we don't.
edit: thanks for the suggestions
> 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
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"!)
You: "it would have never occurred to anyone that humans shouldn’t be slaves"
Come on. Words have meaning.
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.
Some of us eventually find ourselves in situations that defy logical explanation. I've witnessed my own thoughts and plans rippling out into the world and causing external events to unfold. To the point that now, I'm not sure that someone could present evidence to me to prove that our inner and outer worlds aren't connected. It's almost as hard of a problem as science trying to solve how consciousness works, which is why it has nothing to say about it and leaves it to theologians.
The closest metaphysical explanation I have found is that consciousness exists as a field that transcends 4D timespace, so our thoughts shift our awareness into the physical reality of the multiverse that supports its existence. Where one 4D reality is deterministic without free will, 5D reality is stochastic and may only exist because of free will. And this happens for everyone at all times, so that our individuality can be thought of as drops condensed out of the same ocean of consciousness. One spirit fragmented into countless vantage points to subjectively experience reality in separation so as to not be alone.
Meaning that one soul hoarding wealth likely increases its own suffering in its next life.
That realization is at odds with stuff like western religion and capitalism, so the wealthy reject it to protect their ego. Without knowing that (or denying that) ego death can be a crucial part of the ascension process.
My great frustration with this is the power imbalance.
Most of us spend the entirety of our lives treading water, sacrificing some part of our prosperity for others. We have trouble stepping back from that and accepting the level of risk and/or ruthlessness required to take from others to give to ourselves. We lose financially due to our own altruism, or more accurately the taking advantage of that altruism by people acting amorally.
Meanwhile those people win financially and pull up the ladder behind them. They have countless ways, means and opportunities to reduce suffering for others, but choose not to.
The embrace or rejection of altruism shouldn't be what determines financial security, but that's the reality we find ourselves in. Nobility become its opposite.
That's what concepts like taxing the rich are about. In late-stage capitalism, a small number of financial elites eventually rig the game so that others can't win, or arguably even play.
It's the economic expression of the paradox of tolerance.
So the question is, how much more of this are we willing to tolerate before the elites reach the endgame and see the world burn?
The article itself is a list of prior art of introspection and a critique of Marc’s lack of awareness of said art.
"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.
It's very obvious to gamers when someone hasn't played, it actually doesn't matter whether you have high level gear.
There's things you can't buy with money, and respect is one of them. He fundamentally doesn't understand how status works. He could, for free, just put out a video where he says "look at me, I'm a busy CEO, but I play this game even though I'm bad at it".
People would think positively about that.
[0]https://fortune.com/2025/01/20/elon-musk-video-games-scandal...
People who lie about things like that make me sad. It's actually a hard thing to do. Waste of time? Absolutely.
In a loopy recursive way, it is. Cost gates what we can do and become. Paying back your costs to extend your runway is the working principle behind biology, economy and technology. I am not saying rich people are always right, just that cost is not so irrelevant to everything else. I personally think cost satisfaction explains multiple levels, from biology up.
Related to introspection - it certainly has a cost for doing it, and a cost for not doing it. Going happy go lucky is not necessarily optimal, experience was expensive to gain, not using it at all is a big loss. Being paralyzed by rumination is also not optimal, we have to act in time, we can't delay and if we do, it comes out differently.
I feel like they will never suffer the consequences of their actions in any negative way should they get it wrong.
Rarely do we see billionaires not become billionaires because they know how the game is played because they shaped the game so they only ever fail upwards.
Yes, which is why the ranks of the very wealthy are filled with lucky grifters. They got rich by luck, then expanded that wealth with some combination of fanciful statements, lies, and outright fraud.
If you look at the entire entirety of understood history of biology:
The most ruthless always wins
That is to say if I go into a village and kill all the adults and teenagers and steal all the kids who are scared to be killed by me, then I will win in the probably two successive generations that I’ve been able to successfully brainwashing into thinking I’m some kind of God.
That is until somebody kills me and then takes over the structure. For example there are no dictatorships that last past the third generation
That is literally and unambiguously how all life operates
There are intermediary cooperation periods. But if you look at the aggregate time periods including how galaxies form it’s all straight up brute force consumption
The primary issue with this is that there is a significant amount of luck involved in acquiring large sums of wealth.
It's hard to get firm numbers around this, but it's estimated around 30-40% of the wealthiest people in the world, derive their wealth almost entirely from inheritance. It's actually very difficult to measure this accurately because a lot of studies will report people as "self-made" even if they started with a small $10 million loan from their parents.
Wealth also follows power laws such that it's significantly easier to acquire more of it once you pass certain thresholds.
Take Mark Cuban - made billions selling some crappy radio service to Yahoo!. Has done effectively nothing since then except for re-investing the proceeds from the buyout. He's technically self-made but it's hard to argue he was anything other than lucky.
To go back to your biology point:
Figures like Andreessen or Musk (or, at least in my opinion most billoniares) can be directly compared to cancer. They are EXCELLENT at extracting value from the environment they're in. If you limit your moral judgement to just that... then you clearly think cancer is wonderful, since it does the same thing!
Cancer is a group of cells that chemically signal the body to provide resources and spread themselves without restraint, avoiding internal systems that would regulate it via things like apoptosis or other signaling. If you judge a cell by how many resources it can accumulate... Cancer is wildly successful.
But the problem is that extraction without introspection, success with insight, moving without care... eventually actors like this destroy the system they operate within.
Ex - Andreessen should perhaps spend some introspection on the fact that ultimately "dollar bills" are literal cloth (or more likely... digital numbers) that he can't eat, won't shelter him, and can't emotionally satisfy him.
They strictly have value because of the system he operates within that allows exchange, and if he acts without care of that system... he might destroy it. Or it might destroy him.
---
So directly to your point: There is clearly a need for more introspection than "zero". And suggesting otherwise is unbelievably conceited. It is cancerous, and should be treated as such.
You don't even need an amazing job to do that though
I don't think many people would agree with such positions.
I do think that people who have succeeded financially might adopt that ethos as an ex post rationalization.
How many different occupations do you think you would find on the important list. Would it have scientists, mathematicians, doctors, engineers, world leaders, activists, religious figures, teachers?
How many occupations do you think would be on the richest list?
Do you think it is fair to judge the success of Martin Luther King Jr or Albert Einstein based on the amount of money they made?
I'm damn near broke right now but it would be obvious to you if you spent ten minutes with me that I'm healthier both mentally and physically than either of those two and I can walk down any street with relative impunity and talk with any stranger I meet without concern that they'd recognize me and have beef with me over some stupid shit I did online. I know that when I interact with people it's because they want to interact with me and not my money.
It's true that the cage they live in is gilded but it's still a cage.
Sometimes I stumble across wikipedia biography pages a person like a mumblerapper who had a meteoric rise in fame and wealth only to die in a puddle of puke from a Xanax overdose at like 25. It's sad and everything but when I read it I just think "Man, what a fucking idiot..." Like sure this dude probably had a great few years conspicuously consuming a bunch of shit and showing off a bunch of money with some floozies hanging off his arm but where is he now? Dead and cold in a hole in the ground. And he died a pretty pathetic death to boot.
I don't know about Andressen but I'm pretty sure I'll outlive Musk. As risk adverse as he is for his physical safety he'll end up doing something downright stupid that ends in his untimely death. With Andressen there's a growing possiblity that enough people wise up to his destructive impact on society and a movement where people who are still physically capable but with inoperable brain cancer or something start taking out people like Andressen.
Slow and steady wins the race.
They can't go to grocery stores. They can't go to parks. They can't go to casual events. They can't be spontaneous and they can't be serendipitous. Any relationship they have with people is in the shadow of their image. Most people they interact with are trying to grift them in some was as they are a publicly known high value mark. People value what they can get from them vs their personality. Over time they subconsciously under stand this, start to trust no one, and rely heavily on a circle of people who happen to be in reach who may still be grifting them. It is like they live in some artificial habitat on earth, supported by staff, not actually on earth.
No one would think that was a reasonable position.
No one would argue, "Well, food DOES have draw backs. What if you eat too much of it!"
We all inherently understand that you have to eat food, and while being careful not to eat too much.
We would understand that if anyone said, "Look at all these successful people who also didn't eat food!" that they were talking absolute shite.
No one would treat the statement "I don't eat food" as anything other than deeply fucking weird.
Humans are social creatures. We are biologically inclined to follow charismatic leaders, even off a cliff. In most people, the susceptibility to suggestion is much stronger than the strength of their rational beliefs. Just look at American politics, for example.
All of this is to say that if Andreessen said, "I don't eat food," there would be a small but vocal group who would see that as validation of their beliefs; there would be a think-piece in the Atlantic about the history of breatharianism; Hacker News comments about what does "food" mean, really, etc. Yes, people would take it seriously. Just because he's rich and has therefore bought a loud megaphone.
It's worse than that: he thinks the point of playing games is to be number 1 in the world.
To create great wealth in a vibrant capitalist society you have to have some model about the world you can exploit. It can be a better rocket design, some insight into human psychology that can help you raise money, or something else.
Some people fall ass backwards into money through luck, but that's rare, and people with great wealth don't have that luxury because they would squander it away and won't be able to grow what they have been given. At any extreme, you have to have both luck and skill. The best athletes are both incredibly gifted and incredibly hard working
They could be wrong on some things but to pretend they don't have a somewhat functional world model that is different enough from the consensus that it allows them to exploit it for great wealth is just naive.
I think the flip side would be "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" I prefer why aren't you happy myself, but sure, random person commenting on the internet about how the wealthiest people in the world don't know anything about the world, why haven't you exploited your superior knowledge relative to said billionaire to amass great wealth for yourself?
You and I have vastly different mental models of the world. Or, at least, very different definitions of “luck”. For example, I would probably say that anyone who is rich through a “family business” has quite a bit of “luck” to thank (by my definition), except for the founder. And even then, the founder is usually “lucky” by connections (e.g. generous government contracts).
> and people with great wealth don't have that luxury because they would squander it away and won't be able to grow what they have been given
If I had to guess, it probably takes about an IQ of 90 to not lose generational wealth, unless there’s an addiction at play. Maybe even less.
I'm going to take a wild guess, but I would bet you never ran a business. I've never heard this from anyone that ran a business. Sure they give you the whole "I am very fortunate and lucky in my life" but never "yes, it's trivial to run a business"
And my other bet would be you had never had any extended interaction with a 90 IQ individual
No, I said except for the founders. Real easy to be the brother or son or aunt to the family business founder and become rich.
> I've never heard this from anyone that ran a business.
I never said “not time consuming” or “stressful”, which I feel like you’re putting those words in my mouth. The first thing I usually hear from (especially braggarts) small business owners is about the biggest contract that they have, which is usually some government contract or bid that they won from Walmart or Amazon. When ZIRP dried up I heard less bragging about such contracts.
> And my other bet would be you had never had any extended interaction with a 90 IQ individual
All four years of my American public high school education. I’m saying the bottom 25% of my high school class might lose generational wealth through poor decisions (90 IQ is roughly 75% of population). I think that’s fair. We are talking about generational wealth, after all. I can think of a few 90 IQ people from my graduating class that are trust fund kids who haven’t managed to lose it all yet.
I never made a suggestion that financial success is completely independent of anything.
> They could be wrong on some things but to pretend they don't have a somewhat functional world model that is different enough from the consensus that it allows them to exploit it for great wealth is just naive.
It's naive to think that financial success sometimes blinds people into thinking they are generally an expert in all areas?
> but sure, random person commenting on the internet about how the wealthiest people in the world don't know anything about the world
Also, never said anything to this effect.
> why haven't you exploited your superior knowledge relative to said billionaire to amass great wealth for yourself?
How could you possibly know if I have, or have not?
Your entire reply is effectively an unrelated tangent to what I said.
Paul Dirac (1902–1984) was a British theoretical physicist and mathematician whose work on the Dirac equation (1928), which merged quantum mechanics with special relativity, predicted the existence of antimatter, specifically the positron. His approach to this discovery was deeply rooted in a mathematical philosophy that valued elegance, consistency, and a belief that nature is fundamentally mathematical, often placing him ahead of experimental validation.
Radical conservatism in physics, often associated with John Archibald Wheeler, is a philosophical approach that adheres strictly to established, successful principles—like quantum mechanics or general relativity—while pushing them to extreme, unexpected logical conclusions. It involves modifying as few laws as possible (conservative) while daringly following the math to radical insights.
Money simply invested in a market fund generally creates wealth, and that doesn't require a model of the world that's much more sophisticated than the average person's.
"Some people fall ass backwards into money through luck, but that's rare," This feels unsupported as well. How could you even attempt to quantify what percent of success is due to luck, much less establish confidence that this percent is going down?
As an individual? No. There's an interesting paradox here.
The paradox is that almost no matter what game you're playing, you want to play safe when you're winning and take chances when you're losing. That's what most rich people actually do, and naturally they take as few chances as they can.
But the richest of the rich, aren't going to be those. The very richest are going to be those who are comfortably winning, but still feel the need to take high-risk bets. Usually because of a pathological need to prove themselves.
A few of them, that is. For every Jobs, Musk etc. there's going to be twenty rich failsons who failed in their big bets. You just don't hear about them - why would you, they're now a much lower tier of rich.
So I don't think it's necessary to assume the super-rich has a better model of the world than average. Because of this effect, I think they're more likely to have deeply flawed models of the world, and in particular, deeply self-destructive personal values.
There are a number of recent antics from Musk and Trump in particular which I think can illustrate that well. You'd think they'd both be happier people if they were more content with what they had and weren't so eager to fuck up the world for the rest of us - but their messed up personal values get in the way of that.
At least wealth is a quantifiable measure of success in our society.
In contrast, many posters on HN think they're always right (it's notorious for it) with no qualifications whatsoever.
This discussion is a sea of jealously and a perfect example.
Yes, the only reason anyone could have for criticizing the ultra-wealthy is jealousy. It's just the haders, b.
Einstein, Gandhi, Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr, Orwell had tremendous public impact and “success”, with relatively little wealth to show for it.
Wealth gives those with shallow sense of values an easy scoreboard to look down on others, which is how you get disasters like Sam Bankman-Fried’s failed attempt at “effective altruism”, or almost-trillionaires like Musk gutting the federal government, while extracting billions in public funding and subsidies.
To be _abundantly_ clear, I agree with you and your assumptions here - but, please note that you are making some assumptions here about what "success" is defined as, which might explain why other people disagree.
I’m assuming they meant to imply wealth is a measure of positive social impact, which is a bad measure for the reasons I stated. They also might mean it as a proxy for “rightness”, whatever that is, which is even more of a problem but for different reasons.
Also, a lot of wealthly people aren't stupid like we think. They're evil, which is different. And being evil is actually pretty good for being wealthy. Most people are encumbered by their morality. Evil people are not, so they can do much more.
Better to just not think about it.
One of many, many, many stupid things he's said.
This is the kind of person who would benefit from being raised and humanised in a village where people co-operate. Because then, as countless others have discovered, bluster and insults work only until the self-aggrandising narcissist meets someone not only bigger, but with better principles, and an actual leader of people.
There is a reason why many satisfying movie plots involve a final, usually violent comeuppance served to a self-aggrandising narcissist.
Musk made a company that jumpstarted some wealth and invested in other things which exploded.
Toto Wolff is a gazillionaire because he too made some pretty incredibly timed investments.
point is, extreme wealth results from some combination of work, timing luck, strategy, and sociopathy, but they're not all required to span the space of wealthy people.
There's no way to stay a billionaire without being one, as long as there's abject poverty and suffering.
I've never had billions of dollars and realistically I probably won't ever have billions of dollars, but I would certainly like to think that I'd keep enough for myself to keep myself thoroughly entertained, and then give the rest away somehow.
Of course, I've never been tested with this. Maybe if I was gifted billions of dollars I'd be as evil as the rest of the billionaires.
I think they're reflexive people and for Andreessen the long period where he was massively invested in the shadiest crypto companies required pushing a culture of conformity.
A lot of Andreessen's investments were essentially pyramid schemes and the greatest threat to those investments was intellectual honesty & introspection.
Under that pressure from him and others a lot of the tech world shifted towards being more tribal. We saw a huge shift away from intellectual honesty and critiquing actions & ideas on their merits to instead a culture of fiercely defending founders and relentless hype.
I also believe that's why they shifted towards the political rightwing, because the more tribalist approach is presently rewarded on that side.
It turns out that when you actually allow yourself to feel those things, it gives your nervous system the ability to metabolize and process them.
I sometimes encounter this phenomenon among college students in my job as a professor. Most college students have learned some form of it, but not all of them. I often think "somebody should teach them those skills" but it has always felt like it was out of scope for _me_ to be the one teaching them. I'm supposed to be teaching computer science. On the other hand, being unable to act rationally on stimulus is ultimately self-sabotaging, and will they be able to absorb my lessons if they can't get past little things like the way I look or the way I dress? This is not a hypothetical: any faculty member whose courses solicit end of semester feedback gets comments like "I didn't like his class because he seemed smug" or "I could not concentrate because I hated her accent" and nonsense like that.
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.
Many in these positions get there by being really good/smart/lucky at something once and then having a war chest of capital to deploy for life.
It doesn't mean they are a polymath genius with unique worthwhile insights into all facets of the human experience. In fact, it may almost be the opposite. The hyper focus and hustle required to attain what they do often requires withdrawing from the wider world, not being particularly well read, and living in a socioeconomic/political/work bubble.
While there are exceptions with people who were lucky and were at the right spot at the right time, there is a different distribution of character traits compared to society at large.
edit: I don't mean just to shoot you down here--I think there's a counterargument to be made here. It might start with "those folks really are the same as us, responding and acting as we ourselves would when dropped into that environment and surroundings". That would hinge on observing the actions and behaviors of someone who, having lived a life as a billionaire, has lost or forsworn that level of fortune and whose lives we might now judge as in the range of "normal". I think that'll be hard to find; the wealthy making public pledges to give away 99% of their wealth are still ludicrously wealthy, and to my knowledge all make that commitment to do so around when they die--not before.
1. In 1926, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that the rich “are different from you and me,” and Ernest Hemingway supposedly retorted, “Yes, they have more money.”
2. Kurt Vonnegut's obituary for Joseph Heller...
True story, Word of Honor: Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer now dead, and I were at a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island. I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel to know that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel ‘Catch-22’ has earned in its entire history?” And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.” And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?” And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.” Not bad! Rest in peace!”
Or, as Cyndi Lauper sang it, 'Money Changes Everything'
I'm of the latter persuasion, that wealth influences one's personality in important ways.
The ultra wealthy are very different from anyone else. First of all, their focus gets to be 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).
Concentration of power stems from our inability to make good decisions as a group of equals. We have to choose someone to make decisions for the group because there is currently no other working way to make them. Current technology might enable us to find some form of true democracy, but I'm not sure if anyone is looking for it.
Direct democracy has defects that have been apparent for thousands of years. I believe Plato was one of the first to argue that democracy turned into mob rule.[0] It seems unlikely that this was entirely original. Similar ideas must have been current in Athens well before his time, since they had abundant experience with demagogues and other problems during the Peloponnesian War. I don't think Plato's solution (Philosopher Kings) was correct, but it's harder to argue against his framing.
It therefore seems like a question of which approach is less bad up front and whether it decays into something worse. Personally I would satisfied with a functioning republic in the US, which is where I live. What we have now is an oligarchy.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_political_philosophy
The 51% voters are just another self-interested power center that will favor themselves and extract resources from the 49%. Not to mention that the system can be corrupted at every point. For instance, you still need police and military to enforce the results of group decisions; and at any moment they can seize power and take control, unless they're placated with preferential treatment by the system - reinventing systemic hierarchy.
There is no system that is immune to human corruption. And all the high-minded belief in the human spirit, and the good-will of democracy, falls flat with even a cursory examination of previous attempts.
This feels like a rule of the universe, from plants and solar systems to wealth portfolios.
Only catastrophic events break it up.
Because rich people have both the power and motivation to define it in a manner in which they still win. Wealth can be education. Wealth can be contacts. Wealth can be properties. Wealth can be businesses. Wealth can be in other countries.
He's free to choose what to believe. He's not "insulated from his negative world view". If you're correct and introspection is to his benefit and he chooses to forgo it, it's his loss.
So I don't know what you're upset about.
I think his broader point is that people are too introspective in modern times and its paralyzing. For instance, I remember reading a blog that argues that argues PTSD doesn't exist historically. People saw terrible things, buried their children and suffered unimaginable pain but there were no concept of PTSD. He argues that its not because it was taboo (virtually every other topic that was taboo was extensively documented), so perhaps there was less introspection.
https://acoup.blog/2020/04/24/fireside-friday-april-24-2020/
It is that war was ubiquitous and accepted as a positive thing in society, unlike now where it is viewed as at best a necessary evil.
The smaller version of same phenomena I see in enterprises where musings of non/barely technical leadership of a tech org is not only considered as go-to strategy but also why previous plans and implementations which were so obviously crappy not totally replaced yet.
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.
If a poor person had the same view, would anything different happen? I suppose nobody would pay attention.
People having nutty views is a fact of life. Its not related to wealth. It happens among all classes.
He is wrong about almost everything, and especially about introspection.
But he got lucky and wrote a good-enough-for-the-time browser at just the right time.
Now, he mistakes his luck and his F_U_Money for skill and intelligence. And why wouldn't he? He can simply walk away from any situation that makes it seem he is wrong.
And the broader problem in society is nearly the entire populace has been conditioned to ignore the factors of luck and mistake monetary success with hard work and wisdom, when in fact those people are often no more than massively amplified fools.
The massive follies of most these current robber barons makes the case for taxing them out of existence. Once someone has enough money that they and their family cannot spend it in multiple lifetimes of excessive luxury, the only reason to have more is power. We should ramp up tax rates so those people cannot accumulate that power.
Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. A society that fails to manage that fact of human nature dooms itself.
Enough of this consequence-free bullshit is what gets you a French Revolution, and that's good for no one.
Then and now, having a platform isn't the same as having an effective and popular platform for force indoctrination...
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
If you need to work to collect a wage to pay your expenses, you are still labor, sorry if that hurts peoples feelings, but it shouldn't.
Also given retirement in US is self-funded via saving/investment instead of pension, someone who wants a comfortable retirement in many areas of this country needs $1M NW by 65 to generate a $40k/year income (above the social security payments which don't go so far) at safe withdrawal rates.
What category would you place the following 99% of human people:
You you will lose your ability to eat and have housing if you do not show up to a place (even if it’s at your rented apartment) and spend hours doing on what someone else wants you to do
people think that they’re gonna become an independently wealthy millionaire by boot licking their way into some kind of financial windfall
For the majority of working people in the world they never had any type of retirement like this and for anybody who did it was a very temporary period in western society.
So while it might’ve been true in the past that the body was the first thing to break, now it’s just “can you maintain your own financial status in the future given your previous work history.”
Everybody at this point understands that there is no possible job you could as an 18-year-old in 2026 that you will be able to retire from and live comfortably in your twilight years from 65-80 with the earnings and “investments” made in the preceding 50 years of work.
Beyond that if I look around at least the “western” world there are very few of those jobs left that totally destroy your body - military, mining, construction etc… still have a lot of that (My body is ruined from 17 years of military) but it’s a shrinking group
For example most of agriculture is being done mechanically compared to 100 years ago, similarly for manufacturing lines humans are a minority in a manufacturing line at this point
I remember back in the 1990s it would take a work party of three families to cut and bail hay in Texas. I was on one of those crews for at least a couple years as a kid. Literally nobody does that anymore it’s all mechanical bailers and silege wrapping machines
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.
but hey maybe I’m totally wrong
and the number of synchophants and boot lickers who work in tech is going up
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.
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.
> if they fight efforts to unionize, that tells a different story.
You are describing an industry that has outsourced intelligent labor to India and Pakistan for more than 25 years. The efforts to unionize would be like trying to save America's auto industry in 2004.
However, theories of political and social power argue the exact opposite: the power of any ruling class or corporation is actually quite fragile because it depends entirely on the cooperation, obedience, and skills of its subordinates. If highly skilled individuals like blue-collar technologists and programmers collectively withdraw our human resources, skills, and knowledge, we can severely disrupt or paralyze the systems that enrich the platform holders.
0. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire
Individuals cannot convince the Subway app, Raycast or LastPass to defect from Apple or Google's platforms. Using those platforms is an executive decision, and Senior iOS/Android engineers will not voice this minority concern or risk their job to advocate for it. Similarly, Apple and Google's platform monopolies are not designed by individual engineers, but executives that will happily pay to replace you if you feel morally unjust.
The only place where this could work is indie development, since that's the scale where developers have authority to sabotage themselves. And sabotage themselves they would - it would be like Fortnite's removal from the App Store except with ~100,000 times less public outcry. You'd go bankrupt before ever inspiring change on the platform.
Nothing about the technology changed, indie developers have long warned users to not give their OEM control over what they can install. But users don't really care, businesses told them the App Store is "safer" before they ever got to see the alternative.
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 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 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.
As James C. Scott demonstrates in his analysis of authoritarian systems, any formally organized, rigidly planned system is ultimately parasitic on the informal, unscripted practices (which he calls mētis) of the people within it. A closed system cannot survive on its own rigid rules; it requires the constant, active cooperation and practical know-how of its subjects to function.
Gene Sharp's foundational theory of power echoes this: no regime, corporation, or totalitarian system possesses inherent power. Their power derives entirely from the cooperation, obedience, and skills of the people they govern or employ. If blue-collar technologists, developers, and users collectively withdraw their skills, labor, and cooperation, even the most monolithic tech empire can be paralyzed. The power of the OEM is not absolute; it is entirely contingent on your continued participation.
You point to the GNU/FOSS movements as successful because they ignore corporate nemesis-building and instead focus their volunteer hours on creating "something wonderful."
In the study of nonviolent struggle, building alternative social institutions and alternative communication systems are indeed recognized and highly effective methods of intervention. Furthermore, creating "commons" (like open-source software) is crucial because it provides a practical model for a non-commercial way of life.
However, building alternative commons is not a substitute for directly challenging power. As Silvia Federici argues, creating commons must be seen as a complement to the struggle against capital, not an alternative to it. If you only build wonderful alternatives without contesting the power of private capital, your creations remain vulnerable to being enclosed, commodified, or crushed by the very monopolies you are trying to ignore.
Ignoring the oppressor does not make them disappear. If technologists want to reclaim power, the first step is to reject the neoliberal fatalism that views the current corporate dominance as an unchangeable law of nature. Power concedes nothing without a demand, and the limits of tech monopolies are prescribed entirely by the endurance of the people who build and use them.
Framing Apple, Google or Microsoft in this manner is counterproductive and does not produce any serious roadmap to undermine their behavior. The will to change has to come from the top, or else it will never be conclusively realized or codified. Change has to be genuine and desirable, or else someone else will come along to copy FAANG and take their place. This is why regulation provoked such a strong anti-intervention sentiment from businesses; it works. A USB-C iPhone was inevitable, but only once you changed incentive to punish lock-in.
On oppression's flip side, one could argue that the continued success of businesses like IBM provides precedent for private capital to aid and abet mass atrocities without ever facing real punishment. Internal revolution has never produced results in these circumstances, and I don't think it ever will. You can't rely on mushy-gushy feelings to make people do what's right, you have to lay down the law in black-and-white.
So your solution is to trust the powerful to do the right thing?
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.
In general, the one on the fringe building and gaing traction will rise to take over and so on it goes. Builders will find a way or find an excuse.
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.
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.
So congratulations, you are a fool
> Appearing on the Founders podcast this week, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen made the rather extraordinary claim that - going back four hundred years - it would never have occurred to anyone to be “introspective.”