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.
Fair enough. But the software eats the world essay did change the world. Maybe he was lucky, but I still think he managed to position himself in order to be heard with that essay.
How do you think it changed the world? I don’t think that was an especially prescient thing to say/write at that time. The idea that software was poised to continue to grow in 2011 was pretty obvious to most people. It is true that some companies were undervalued and many VCs and other folks were scarred from the dotcom bust.
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.
You should look into the person Marc hired to research and validate that for him (basically write it) Ro Venkatesh. His essays are quite titilating. And you can immediately see it was Ro's idea not Marc's.
I honestly think there's more going on here. It seems to be primarily the vain billionaires that are going off the deep end. I experimented with stimulants when I was young and I remember being shocked at how they changed my personality. I went from pretty stoic to wanting to fight people over the slightest perceived insult. I can't help but think these billionaires with their expensive implants, hair and skin treatments, blood boys, etc. are on some life-extending or performance enhancing stimulants that are affecting their state of mind.
I'm not defending Musk, but "problematic" used in this type of context is one of those words that says more about the speaker than it does the subject.
I feel like taking issue with a word, even when used in a perfectly valid situation, is something worth reflection. Like fair enough if you've heard problematic used in ways you disagree with before, but maybe respond to those comments, not one where you agree with its use. Unless you actually do mean to defend Musk and don't think lying to investors, calling people pedos for saving kids, delaying public infrastructure, doing Nazi salutes, etc. etc. is problematic.
Being rich != being famous. There are tons of extremely wealthy people out there that keep a very low profile. Sure they might be well known within their circle but ask the average person and they have no clue who that person is. I would say this is the case for like 90-95% of billionaires.
Musk, Andreessen, Zuck and others were all in this camp 10 years ago but they all decided that simply being rich wasn't enough, they wanted to be famous. These folks have all the resources and connections to become famous so they can get on all the podcasts, write op-eds, and are guaranteed to get the best reach on social media and thus the most eyeballs on their content and the most attention paid to them.
But when you go from making a few media appearances a year to constantly making media appearances in one way or another is that you need more "content" so to speak. Just like a comedian needs more content if they are going to do a 1hr special versus a 10min set at a comedy club.
The problem for all these guys is they have a few genuinely insightful ideas mixed in with a ton of cooky and out of touch ideas. Before they could safely stick to the genuinely insightful ideas but as they've made more and more appearances, they have to reach for some of those other ideas. They don't realize that their cooky ideas sound very different than their few insightful ideas. They think all their ideas are insightful based on the feedback they have been getting for the past decade or so.
I need to reread it but Paul Fussell makes the case that old wealth is inconspicuous and secure (and maybe inherited) versus nouveau riche which is about visible luxury, branding, and showy consumption. I don't remember if he mentions the need to promote ideas.
I think Musk definitely financed many of his ventures on his personal brand. The amount of capital he could raise because of his public persona as some kind of Tony Stark, made all the difference.
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.
There's also differences between fame, infamy, popularity and elite social status, which is probably not all that clear to newly-minted billionaires that are already lacking in the social skills department.
I often wonder if tech billionaire psychosis might lead to a "Great Filter" event for our species. They have entirely unchecked power, lack of empathy, and gleeful ignorance of everything our species has done that their success rests upon.
I doubt that. The only thing social media removed was scruples and shame.
People were ashamed to say such dumb things and now they think they have some kind of deeper knowledge.
After one becomes wealthy, social media easily becomes the only place where anyone says no to them. When everyone who surrounds you tells you "you're absolutely right, let me get that for you", you atrophy the muscle that let's you course correct when you're making a mistake, and when someone disagrees with you it feels that much stronger.
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.
Blocking people that annoy him on Twitter is the only humanizing thing about him. Deciding that someone has annoyed you enough on that platform that you don't care to ever hear from them ever again is the only thing that made that platform usable when you have any minimal audience.
"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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
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...)
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 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.
> 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. ... 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.
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.
I think people get dumber as they age. I feel like I'm probably dumber than me 10 years ago. No one wants to admit it, but I sense it in myself and I think I can see it in other people. I feel like peak brain is probably like 22 years old if we are being honest. Yeah you might still be doing dumb kid stuff but you are at the age where you just have this energizer bunny inside. You can just go to the library and churn multiple all day and night sessions. Sleep in one day and perfectly recovered. I "know" more now but I'm definitely slower than when I was younger.
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.
Only because we don't allow ourselves to get serious until we hit like 25 years old imo, and only barely then. Imagine a 22 year old raised among Shaolin monks. Probably would be the wisest person you will ever meet.
I'm not sure. There's value from teachings, but there's a certain type of wisdom that only comes from lived experience. Kind of like in software development - a new grad can read Designing Data Intensive Systems and memorize all the answers for "design Facebook/Twitter/YouTube/etc." interview questions, but someone who actually built a platform with millions of users is going to have a different level of understanding. In my life, I can say that no amount of learning from others prepared me for what I learned about myself during my first relationship.
All the more reason to start earlier, so you have more lived experience on the job by your mental peak at 22. Instead your lived experience is playing Halo or something like that by that point. Or wasting time flipping burgers. Wish I could have dumped all the hours I did in restaurant work in highschool into research. The door was shut though until I got into undergrad even though I was a hard worker and could have picked it up then. A lot of parallels between food service and lab work, I learned after the fact.
Ah if you look at it from the perspective of doing research or other deep intellectual work by 22, I can see your point. Certainly if that is the peak of human mental capability (not something I can argue for or against but I'll take it as true) you ideally would pursue a focused education up to that point that allows you to dive deep into a challenging problem. IMO this is different from wisdom however, and in fact pursuing the variety of experiences and interactions with others that you need to build wisdom will distract from the focus on your research subject.
These people are almost unimaginably wealthy to the point where they're effectively unchallenged if they're not directly challenging the state (and even then they win quite a few rounds). "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
He is absolutely a fraud. He has been lying about many things for more than a decade to boost his stock. He has more in common with Trevor Milton than anyone else.
Obnoxious, egocentric, very low EQ, and with almost no moral values, absolutely. Fraud? Not sure. He did make a lot of outlandish predictions, but on the other hand, Tesla revolutionized EVs (forcing everyone to follow suit), and SpaceX revolutionized space tech. He can't take credit for the technical achievements in either, but he did have the tenacity to push both through. Can't say many other people would have done that.
You definitely got wiser—we all do—but I think there’s also a big shift in both what they think they can say safely in public and the sycophantic reinforcement they get on social media. Rich guys have always had that problem to some extent but it used to be less public—nothing like Musk just tossing out some inane insight while high and getting hundreds of thousands of fans applauding. Human brains don’t handle that well, and you can tell these guys haven’t had to defend an idea rigorously in years.
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.
I remember when Elon came up with the hyper loop idea and everybody I worked with at the time thought it was revolutionary. These were very smart people who were fooled.
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.
Anyone who assumes they won't be fooled is setting themselves up for disaster.
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
I genuinely don't know how the mental model of such a person works where they look at Elon who got multiple world changing bets right but they focus on the ones that were wrong.
I feel like a lot of the ideas are over-attributed to him. Tesla already existed, electric cars aren't really a revolutionary idea. He's a hype man and he does the hype stuff well. Cybertruck was a pretty unmitigated disaster. self-driving is not really working out as he promised. I still remember arguing with people in 2020 who thought you'd be able to sleep in your car in a few years. Seems like Waymo is beating them to robo-taxis. Hyperloop was a bad idea.
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.
Definitely not. The companies that were prototyping it all went bankrupt. The "Vegas Loop" is just a tunnel with Tesla car traffic in it and I don't even think they're fully self driving! Very very underwhelming. Not even remotely close to the "NY to DC in 29 minutes" which he promised.
We would have been much better off with investment in tried-and-true boring old trains.
A bit of both. You became more attuned to what really does and does not make sense and they rotted a bit further. But 10 years ago it was pretty visible for both Musk and Andreessen.
Money can buy greater latitude with mistakes. Mistakes that would have been career ending for low level employee, is an amusing anecdote to be remembered at a gathering or in a book.
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 ).
A decade ago wasn't Musk talking about Hyperloop? He sounded like an idiot to many people then, too. His companies were good at the time but once he talked about anything else I feel like it was pretty clear who he was.
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.
The way I suspect they think is this. A pyramid is always going to be there, it is better we reinforce and consolidate our power at top with the friendlies below and make it sound like that is the best option for everyone.
The question is what you think now of their old opinions. If you think the same, they have changed. If you think differently, you have changed.
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).
When you reach a certain level of wealth and power, it seems like it’s very easy to surround yourself with people who only tell you how brilliant and successful you are.
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.
IMO they were always the way that they are now, they just didn't broadcast it in public.
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.
There's the whole "billionaire bubble" thing, where they get surrounded by folks who have an economic interest in keeping the billionaire happy... but I'd posit there's another big change -- tech billionaires didn't used to have any cultural or political juice. This meant that even if they had some weird / bad takes, they kept them quiet.
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.
To add to the answers given already, there's the matter of the sheer scale of wealth these people have (especially relative to e.g. median worker wages). The richest people on earth in the 80s were a bunch of discreet Japanese CEOs with 5 or 6 billion$ to their name. They were very rich, sure, and surely could influence politics with their wealth.
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.
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
It's both. Back then[0], the ultra-wealthy had whole teams of PR managers - people devoted to doing the verbal equivalent of making sure they were lit with perfect 5500K portrait lighting at every angle. In other words, DLSS 5 but for personality. In order to sustain that kind of shitty magic trick, the PR team needs to completely control everything they say. This is a lot of effort.
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.
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.
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.
Also a product of the US stock market going up and to the right for the last couple of decades. It's very easy to convince yourself that you are some great perceptor of the world because you've been getting 30% CAGR on your portfolio for the last few many years.
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.
I very much agree with your first paragraph. But then to say you could just simply invest in "in any Stanford/Berkeley/MIT person who walked through your doors, it was impossible to end up in the red." is the kind of non-reflective and overly simplistic thinking you are criticizing.
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.
If you had just invested in any provably smart person with a software idea, it was very hard to lose (in sum) in the last 15 years. I don't think it's too simplistic. That's just how crazy the US tech industry has been over the last two decades.
>The majority of investors even in this boom also failed.
No? My point was the majority succeeded. If you had any sort of diversification, it was hard to end up with a loss.
Anti intellectualism is also falling into the local optima trap of “rich people bad” that a lots of people seem to fall into. The idea that rich people have something to say is so alien that no deeper analysis is warranted.
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.
> 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.
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.
Is it true? Even on a small scale, when I taught kids how to swim for $20k/year I believe I did more for society than when I built systems to help a large streaming service deliver ads for $100k/year. There are certainly exceptions, but in general money comes from extracting value from others, while jobs that provide to society are not extractive and this pay less.
This is fundamentally wrong. If Elon created Tesla and made ~$100B of wealth from it, he also made all the other shareholders richer by way more. Not only that - the world now has Teslas it otherwise wouldn't. Everyone wins and there is no extraction of values (old Marxist jargon that needs to go away).
goes both ways. elitism exists on both ends of the spectrum. the academic side is largely the same thing except it's attained from years of schooling through certain pedagogues that tout the one true way and if you haven't been through that wringer, then your understanding doesn't count. true intellectualism, has humility and the everlasting honest pursuit for truth. neither of these extremes have this quality.
No, I don't think it's the same thing at all. For many intellectual fields, I'd say having an academic degree (or a degree's equivalent of knowledge) in the subject is more-or-less required to have an intelligent, novel opinion on the subject.
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.
> 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
I don’t think competence implies elitism. On many topics, everyone’s opinion isn’t equal. I wouldn’t trust a random person’s opinion on civil engineering; philosophy in the sense of the specific field of philosophy (metaphysics, ethics, etc.) is no different. The effects are just more abstract.
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 had experience in a couple academic insitutions and among hundreds of faculty I've met, only three were real elitist assholes. Known among the departments as such too. But hey, they bring in the grant money, so people let them continue to run toxic labs. At least their sub pis are usually decent people.
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'm not talking about fawning, I'm talking about taking the "intellectual" thoughts of rich people as seriously as academics/intellectuals. The notion of taking John Rockefeller's ideas on metaphysics seriously would have been seen as strange by his contemporaries.
What's kind of unique about the US is the way poor or middle-class people idolize the rich. As the saying goes, everyone feels like a temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
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.
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'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 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.
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.
You have got it right (though IDK what you mean by unity and zero), the author is even less well read than Andreesen so their arguments make no sense since they don't have this background.
“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.”
Often I'm not even entirely convinced they know a lot about their own business either. It seems like the ones who make the cartoonishly large amounts of money are the ones who got lucky to hire decent people early on.
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.
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.
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.
Introspection is the conscious examination of one’s own mental, emotional, and cognitive processes to improve self-awareness. I think Marc's critique here is a lot of what can be learned about past mistakes is outside of an individual's own failings.
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.
You are right, a simpler way to frame it is: Marc is not anti introspection but post introspection in that there's something beyond introspection. The author seems to have made an uncharitable take for easy virality.
People have been doing self-examination for a long time, but Freud's use of psychoanalysis is a fairly modern phenomenon and it's benefits are dubious. Modern therapy looks increasingly like pseudoscience. I expect biotech/AI advancements to make much of modern therapy irrelevant over time, as we obtain fine-grained control over the actual processes in the brain causing various afflictions.
modern therapy has nothing to with Freud, modern therapy approaches are empirically tested, and show efficacy comparable to medication, but sure other than that whole modern scientific approach... its definitely just pseudoscience
the only pseudoscience you mentioned is the idea that mental "afflictions" are entirely biological
For sure Freud and modern therapy as practiced today are very different. Freud influenced the language, structure, and goals of talk therapy more than the exact methods most therapists use now. Modern therapy kept many of his clinical observations about inner conflict and relationships, but dropped or revised a lot of his more speculative theory.
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.
> “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.
And the people that fawn all over every single word they say think they'll eventually have the same money as well. But in the end they'll just be dumber.
Isn't this whole comment section about engaging with the material itself and disagreeing with it? I don't see anybody here saying that Andreessen's ideas are bad specifically because he has money, they are saying the ideas he has are bad and he has money and that's probably letting him get away with broadcasting terrible ideas.
I have a personal belief that this is a result of the "can-do" attitude that pervades not only American society currently; but virtually all of American history.
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.
Well, yes and no. A can do attitude is needed to imagine taking over fighting a global British empire. All around the world people needed to muster up that courage. That said, equating the outcome of that with smartness was bound to happen. That said, they leadership got co-opted by money outcomes is where the downfall happened, IMO
Political elites in a vast colony far from the empire’s center gambled that the empire did not have the will to grind out an expensive victory against fellow elites. This proved to be correct.
I think there's something to this. And while America has always had this can-do attitude (just look at the number of self help books), it does seem to be in another gear recently. I don't know what caused it, but I think there have been a number of indicators: Trump ignoring Congress and introducing wild tariffs, Musk firing half of Twitter's staff and then later repeating this with DOGE, the quick roll-out of LLMs. There seems to be this prevailing attitude of "we can just do stuff, damn the consequences".
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.
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.
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.
Introspection is not doomscrolling though. Being tugged around by short-lived stimuli from a feed is the opposite of deep self-reflection.
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.
I think this conclusion in itself is more introspection than reading the news. After all most news events are external and whether you read about them or not doesn't make any difference. Its really more the opposite of introspection.
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.
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.
You are again making the same mistake, please try to understand what I'm saying. Atheism was a known concept at least amongst some priestly class in India but that didn't matter - the larger part of the society was not developed enough to understand it.
Society only meaningfully changes when a critical mass of people understand and apply a concept - in this case introspection.
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 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]
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.
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.
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.
Non-introspection is a fantastic source of strategic vulnerability. It can facilitate a bias to action which has it's clear value. However, if you are creating a highly valuable asset then it puts you in a position where you are extremely easy to manipulate and harvest. Perhaps this serves VCs quite well.
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.
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.
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?
You're absolutely right! His sentence about not really needing introspection and the right approach being "Move forward. Go." should be read as the Zen koan it is and carefully introspected on. This is the secret of enlightenment. True enlightenment is no-mind: it's not just zero introspection, it's zero of every dualistic craving. Pure action, without anyone being "there" to act: it's about walking the path, not just sitting and reflecting on it.
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...
Personally I cleave to the extremes of the hyperintrospective portion of the spectrum, so no, I think taken at face value his comments are absurd.
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.
But why give him credit for subtext for which there's no apparent evidence? By all appearances he's saying this stuff in earnest. Why does it need to be "encoded"?
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.
Which makes me curious about what Marc actually meant. The quote itself raises eyebrows.
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.
>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
>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.
It's also worth looking at where Andreeson seats the origin of harmful introspection - in turn of the last century Vienna, with Freud. That is to say, introspection is a product of Judeo-bolshivism, created by the Jews to sap Aryan man of his natural vitality and dominance. It's sick, but it's just another example, along with the admiration of Italian Futurism, of how Andreeson has immersed himself in a fascist milieu.
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).
Counterpoint -- Yes he's wrong and obviously so. But is some rich dude saying something stupid worthy of platforming?
It almost feels to me like acting as though a famous person being gasp wrong about something is implicitly suggesting that this is somehow surprising?
We should be surprised and write essays when the smartest people we know say something silly. Just because somebody's bank account has some zeroes in it doesn't mean it should be worthy of our focus.
These people have profoundly inflated egos, platforming them if only for the express purpose of mocking them mercilessly in front of the entire world is absolutely worth it.
These people are insanely powerful forces in the modern world. Of course we should talk about them (and usually how
Wrong, shortsighted, and self-serving they are).
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.
As a billionaire you can afford to just go, because unlike us mortals you are shielded from all consequences. It's also why the tech moguls are now called oligarchs. Because they kind of are.
The problem with certain intellectual pursuits is that it becomes its own little sub culture with its own little sub culture celebrities.
You see, High School never ended. Things can still get lame in the “real world”. The “geeks” need to shut up and go back to the geek table and be more humble. The whole lot of us have demonstrated limited ability on how to be decent.
To quote Rick James:
”They should have never given you developers money. Fuck your Ping Pong table, fuck. Your. Ping. Pong. Table!”
This whole debate is pretty weird and misguided, IMO. Marc Andreesen can be right about what works for him. Joan Westenberg can be right about what works for her. This would be obvious to a five year old. This whole brouhaha seems to be merely the setting for HN'ers (and everyone else) to continue their ongoing battles about how the world should and must be and why "the other side" is Wrong. Search through the comments here. Somehow Elon, Luigi Magnione, and Trump are pulled into the discussion.
The problem is with the media pouring endless attention on these tech bros and bestowing the mantel of expertise in every field on them - philosophy, politics, religion, sociology.
So now they spout their mouth off and the media hangs on their every word and debates it.
Marc Andreessen is wrong about many things that may be worth arguing against, but not here: this was completely idiotic take that doesn't deserve anything but contempt.
And it's not like you could convinced his followers that this take is wrong, anyone gullible enough to take such an insane take at face value is very unlikely to read your rebuttal.
Yes this is a stupid idea, but commentators are forgetting everyone has stupid ideas. I would imagine the vast majority of commentators in this thread hold one, like
- Socialism / Communism is a good idea
- Functional or OOP programming is a good idea
- LLM's will replace programmers
- Languages like Javascript, Typescript, or Python are actually good and should be used
- 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.
This notion that CEOs are geniuses is just patently false. They are average, and mostly distinguish themselves only in their arrogance and avarice. I would bet the IQ of the average HN reader to be higher than the average C-Suite exec.
> 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
He’s right in that business success is largely correlated with sociopathy, it helps you focus on the goal of maximizing your own wealth without worrying about the messy details of how other human beings are affected.
Going back four hundred years, it would have never occurred to anyone that humans shouldn’t be slaves or that the environment will be irrecoverably destroyed if everyone pillages it for their own business needs.
"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
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"!)
> 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.
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,
Well a lot of Eastern religions do talk about sustainability 1000s of years back. Just because it was never part of Abrahamic faiths and their offshoot cultures which took over the world, does not mean that humans did not think this way
I think that is too little credit to previous humans: people objecting to slavery were around four hundred and more years ago. Similarly, concerns about environmental destruction are also old.
We all know he’s wrong. The problem isn’t that he is wrong, it’s that we have elevated the wealthy into a status where they can be wrong, have no correction, and make decisions whole clothe which negatively affect the rest of us. All while being insulated from their negative world view.
Tim Dillon said summarized it pretty well - can't remember or find the exact quote. Something to the effect of:
"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.
What I took from the video game thing is that he thought he could fool people.
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".
This is made even more interesting by the fact that musk was caught misrepresenting himself playing the computer game Diablo in the not-so-distant past. IIRC he was either buying accounts or paying someone else to stream on his behalf. [0]
> In their minds, financial success is the ultimate yardstick.
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.
That may or may not be true in aggregate, but for extreme outliers it's impossible to separate from survivorship bias. Are Musk and Andreeson really the most skilled entrepreneurs in the world or are they just good enough for luck to propel them to stratospheric success?
They found luck and success and continue to compound that. However it's easy to make so much money when you have that much already. Just promise the world or invest in companies that do and ride unicorns with private investments into the sunset. The risk they take now is very low.
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.
> Just promise the world or invest in companies that do and ride unicorns with private investments into the sunset.
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
That's not how humans came to populate areas that previously were dominated by predators who would be obviously deadly to individual humans. Cooperation and planning are what made physically weak humans dominant. That cooperation and planning developed and flourished without authoritarian structures.
A brief look at certain native American tribes might show quite a lot of talking and consensus building, like if some war chief wants a war he needs to drum up support for that. Hours of talking ensue! Not to say that ancient tribes didn't have the worst of what modern corporations have to offer as far as leadership goes, but a claim "basically every village" is basically wrong, or "bascially" is carrying a heck of a lot of weight.
Read some Charles Mann. Tribal leaders if they can really be described as leaders had to work with consensus and cooperation. Modern society is much more coercive.
Sure, but this argument doesn't actually invalidate the parent at all.
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.
Oh come on. So you're rooting for the evil genius in the comic book movie? You would harm millions of people to move up the financial success yardstick?
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.
If you were to make a list of the most important people in history how different would it be from the list of the richest people in history?
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.
I have yet to check the prediction markets for this proposition but I would bet on Peter Thiel being the first one to mistake a fancy cup for the Holy Grail.
The curse of fame is really underappreciated. Rich and famous people obviously never talk about it in public as it is going against the narrative that builds their brands, but they feel it. They are so jealous of the quietly rich who no one will recognize. Who can still live the same life as you and I. They really are trapped. They basically have to fall of the face of the earth and age out of their appearance to have a chance of obscurity. And their line of work makes that impossible.
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.
I feel like your comment is evidence that you are insufficiently acquainted with various flavors of cult-like behavior and wingnuttery. There are in fact people who sincerely believe that you don't have to eat [1], who believe it so fervently that they risk and sometimes lose their lives for that belief.
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.
Are you kidding? People would eat that up if he said that. Soylent would sell like crazy. You'd see protein smoothie shops pop up all over the bay area. For better or worse there is a subset of people who just lap up at whatever comes out of these people's mouth.
You say financial success as though it is completely independent of pretty much everything. "How could I be wrong, look how handsome I am"
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?
> Some people fall ass backwards into money through luck, but that's rare
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.
The greatest philosophers are rarely the wealthiest people. Wealth generally comes from being presented with opportunities, putting in the work to make the most of those opportunities, and being lucky enough that they end up being good. Intelligence can be an asset here, but bigger assets are knowing people already in positions of power, already having resources you can leverage, and being willing sacrifice years of your life in pursuit of wealth. Those factors don't require you to be well reasoned, logical, or intelligent.
I think Marc might be referring to "navel gazing". If introspection is so important, we wouldn't need to do experiments to figure out what is reality. He could be advocating for Empiricism. You will find quotes like "If unsure, take a decision and make it right later. Don't get trapped in analysis paralysis". Basically two camps are fighting here : those who think reality can be figured out by thinking alone. and those who think we need to get out there and collect data and analyse it.
I am personally biased toward Radical Conversatism.
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.
Hmm, I think this statement needs some support "To create great wealth in a vibrant capitalist society you have to have some model about the world you can exploit."
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?
> To create great wealth in a vibrant capitalist society you have to have some model about the world you can exploit.
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.
I think the answer for most people is one of "I wasn't dealt the right hand of cards by fate" and/or "I don't want to spend my life acting like a sociopath and exploiting others for a small chance at great wealth."
Also doesn't help that wealth means they can own newspapers or social media to promote their shitty takes as gospel, and have armies of regular Joe fanbois, that kiss their ass and tell us how wise they are...
HN posters are famously overconfident, sure, but wealth is a bad measure of success. Putin is one of the richest people on earth, but responsible for extreme political repression and global instability. Pablo Escobar did very well financially. Financial success says how well you’ve extracted wealth from others, and approximately zero about your contributions to society.
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.
> wealth is a bad measure of[...]your contributions to society
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.
Thank you for illustrating another feature of the billionaires' defensive bubble: anyone who dares criticize them from a position of lesser wealth is just "jealous" and their criticism is presumptively invalid.
There is obviously some minimum level of competence and intelligence required to be wealthy (not losing all of it), but for many becoming fabulously wealthy is as much a matter of circumstance than anything else. I would guess most people here would also be billionaires if they had the same opportunities and circumstances as Musk.
I don't think there's a minimum level of competence even. You can get very wealthy by sheer luck and timing.
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.
This reminds of me the following wonderful Numberphile video [1] where they compare the success of billionares to gas molecules: "everybody is just bumping around randomly but the one person that, you know, that became a billionare or something--they wrote their autobiography 'how I got here, all the great decisions I made to beat everybody'... It was just random." I've always wondered whether it would be possible to compute the expected number of billionaires with a model like this. If the number is higher than the expectation, well ok, some fraction of them are consciously steering themselves into billionaire-hood. Otherwise, it's probably dumb luck. It's a fun null hypothesis.
Everyone thinks they are right, but it’s having the grace to be able learn, be wrong and develop is the point here! Also your average HN commenter does not get listened to or promoted anywhere to the same degree!
In one interview, Mush called it the "empathy exploit".
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.
that's a stretch: andreessen got wealthy because he worked for the UIUC group in a project which turned out super popular, super funded by Jim Clark, and got massive explosion in worth. there's no sociopathy involved from him back then.
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.
"Better to just not think about it" feels like the majority sentiment and a lot of people's path to their own (albeit less) success. We’ve got lots of modern phrases like "don’t listen to the haters" or "you do you" or things like imposter syndrome to support it.
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.
Yes. One of the most important things to learn is how to introspect and actually FEEL the pain that surfaces when you do. That's how healing begins. If you never do that, you're stuck in whatever destructive patterns you use to avoid that introspection forever.
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 also think it is important to learn to feel and to separate the feeling from the acting on the feelings. In my mind this is what distinguishes an adult from a child. Sadly, I know many adults who have never learned this lesson (including members of my own family), so it's probably not a very good legal definition, although I like it as a practical one.
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.
I've taken the position that anything the ultra-wealthy say is likely wrong, and every decision they take will negatively affect society, unless and until its corroborated by an unbiased source with expertise in the subject matter.
I think the ultra-wealthy are just operating under what they think they need to tell people in order to get the outcomes they want. You're only going to hear the truth - or something correct - if its to their benefit.
I used to think this but I think that's only true for the low-profile wealthy folks. And they voice their opinion indirectly, like through owning media companies.
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.
Yes, deciding to be famous AFTER becoming rich is a choice, and arguably not optimally intelligent.
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.
The ultra-wealthy are no different from anyone else. However the effects of their decisions - both good and bad - tend to be much larger than what most of us can do.
Yes, they are different: People who care about others are less likely to become ultra rich. You become ultra rich by mostly caring about your cut and your profits.
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.
I invite you to expand on your blanket statement. I posit that the ultra-wealthy are necessarily and unavoidably transformed by the lived experience of having that level of wealth: virtually any logistical inconvenience you and I currently relate to can be monied away; the proportion of strangers and near-strangers that want to interact with you deferentially and transactionally jumps; the consequences for many of your mistakes become invisible to you.
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.
I agree that the consequences are greater.
There seem to be at least two perspectives on whether wealth makes you different:
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.
I think the Hemingway line could read two ways. He could be saying there is no difference save for having money. Or, he could be implying money is corrupting and would lead to the same observed behaviors no matter who gets rich.
The nature of the ultra wealthy is obviously no different than the rest of us - but the nurture and environment they live is in extremely different. That they live so isolated from the broader human community, are so disconnected from routine discomforts, and so shielded from any kind of consequences is an obvious difference from the rest of us. It’s no wonder they develop sociopathic tendencies when they are materially rewarded for such behavior and have no empathy for the way the rest of us must live.
>The ultra-wealthy are no different from anyone else
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).
I really like the way you put it: “It’s okay to be wrong. We’re all wrong from time to time. What’s not okay is not having a way to be corrected by the outside world for a specific reason: being at the top of the political pyramid, being ultra-wealthy and surrounded by flattery, etc"
You're right, but we've never devised any system that prevents this from happening. Every single organization leads to a concentration of wealth and power. And even those ideally conceived to have counterbalancing forces, eventually are corrupted and subverted. It seems to be the steady state of reality.
This will be the reality until we come up with a way to make good decisions using direct democracy, and make that decision-making process so fast and easy that it can be used for any kind of group decision.
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.
There does not seem to be an easy answer for which political system delivers the best benefits.
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.
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.
All of reality clumps no? Any grouping tends to attract more grouping, because the force that created the group increases as its groups more. Be it wealth, power, or sheer mass.
This feels like a rule of the universe, from plants and solar systems to wealth portfolios.
It's a lovely idea, but that system will have to be enforced by a power structure... which will always tend to grant itself special privileges. And even before such corruption, without inherited wealth, there will still be entrenched institutions that control resources, and have a continuity of leadership, that will always be looking out for themselves and their in-group. It's just natural.
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.
I think you have put this in a correct, concise manner which I agree with entirely.
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.
You're correcting him by commenting on a popular article arguing he's wrong. So it appears he has been "corrected" rather broadly and vocally
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.
It's not just war. Take infant deaths. Absolutely devastating today, but a large percent of people went through that in the past. They even re-used the names of their dead children.
To put it another way, the problem is not what this idiot is saying on some podcast, the problem is that people are listening to it. For example, in the case of this blogger, listening and then taking the time to publish a web page about what was said, hoping to make money from readers
That has been the case for a vast swathe of time across history. It hurts because we had a nice couple of decades where it seemed that, not only was this not the case, but that we were directionally accelerating away from it.
Immense wealth or power should be difficult to hold on to. Until our policymakers understand that we'll have to occasionally resort to the Luigi method.
Not just elevated them, but effectively given them a free pass for anything they do.
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.
Yes. I mean calling them out and people take personal offense as if they are receiving handouts from them or they are that rich. They don't give a damn about anyone or anything for that matter
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.
We've entered the "Emperor has no Clothes; but if I just prend he does, I'll be elevated higher than anyone who says otherwise" or "Lets all try to keep ourselves out of the permanent underclass"
The penultimate sentence of this fantastic 1997 interview with Trump has stayed with me since I read it: "Trump, who had aspired to and achieved the ultimate luxury, an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul."
Not just crypto in the "ride the lightning that is bitcoin" but NFTs. FFS, that takes some serious lack of introspection as to assign any value to those things other than laundering money and duping the public.
They should be forced to stay at a Holiday Inn Express and meet at a Detroit Denny's to discuss the future of the world. Maybe get some perspective in the process!
A salient comment on the current times. But I'll extend it beyond just wealthy people. We have given every soul a platform. At first glance, that seems like a good thing. But we've given everyone a platform where they can accumulate large followings and express a great many opinions completely unchallenged. In reality, we've built force multiplier tools that enable the dissemination of all takes, good and bad, at a rather alarming rate. And, I would argue, the average joe is a bit gullible and easy to indoctrinate. Society, largely speaking, does not receive enough education and protections against these types of indoctrination platforms that we've made. That celebrities, ultra wealthy individuals, bad actors, and random dumbasses can all use and abuse to sell some physical or cognitive junk.
It’s really heartening to see that “eat the rich” is finally becoming a consistent message on HN
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
Americans are weird creatures in this regard. Give them 5% of their compensation / 0.0001% of a company in stock/options and suddenly they think they have become Big Capital.
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.
John Steinbeck: “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires”
It's a big number, but it's often tied up in housing in VHCOL/HCOL areas. It also doesn't mean much re: not needing to work in these areas.
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.
These terms are all pretty flexible - blue collar in 1950 is extremely different than blue collar in 2026.
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
Having your body worn out before you can retire assumes retirement as a concept exists, which it doesn’t in the US. “Retirement” aka living without working, as a blue collar worker, was a middle class fantasy that only existed for an extremely small minority of people from 1949-1985. Even the ones who had their bodies worn out dealt with years of asbestos poisoning black lung all these other externalities that corporations did not care about and so arguing about this concept of retirement is moot because it’s never really a real thing.
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
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.
Organizing years ago would have been huge for software developers but unfortunately I do think it is too late now, given the onset of AI (weakens the collective by improving individual productivity since not every developer will be onboard) and just the current political landscape. The NLRB has been gutted.
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.
this is so funny for me to read. a few years ago, i would see programmers saying they can negotiate better deals for themselves than a union could. now you're saying it's already over, programming as a skill has a future valuation that's heading to zero.
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.
Individuals can negotiate insane labors deals for themselves. Go ask the best-paid person you know how they got their pay package, it usually entails some form of schmoozing. Unions are for bringing the bottom-rung up to par, not for raising the top bar further.
> 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.
The fatalistic view that "platform holders have all the cards" and that "programming as a skill has a future valuation that's heading to zero" is a common psychological barrier in labor struggles. Oppressed or subordinate groups often suffer from a "diffuse, magical belief in the invulnerability and power of the oppressor"[0].
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.
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
Of course you're not here to argue, there's no precedent for what you're suggesting. Nobody has fought against Apple, Google or Microsoft and taken home a significant victory.
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.
Your belief that "power structures can't be fixed" perfectly illustrates what educator Paulo Freire described as the oppressed having a "diffuse, magical belief in the invulnerability and power of the oppressor". Anthropologist David Graeber noted that modern capitalism has constructed a vast bureaucratic apparatus "designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures" and to ensure that challenging existing power arrangements seems like an "idle fantasy". The idea that the platform holder holds all the cards is an ideological tool used to encourage passivity and convince you that your only option is to submit.
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.
What we're seeing is the culmination of these three ideas:
1. Prosperity theology [1]. This idea took hold in early Protestantism. Even if you're not religious, it's had an undeniable impact on the West (including the so-called "Protestant work ethic"). The idea is that you are essentially blsssed by God if you are rich. This was a huge departure from Catholic dogma. If Jesus was real and came back in Texas today he'd get hung at a Communist terrorist;
2. The myth of meritocracy. This is a core tenet of capitalism that the wealthy are that way because they deserve to be; and
#. In the US in particular, hyper-individualism. Specifically, the destruction of any kinf of collectivism. This shields people from the impacts of their actions and any kind of accountability.
People who find success tend to get high on their own supply and they have no one around them to correct their behavior. Instead they have a cadre of slavishly sycophantic yes men.
There's a common refrain that it takes three generations to go from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves. The vast majority of fortunes are lost, or at least significantly reduced, within 3 generations because the later generations get surrounded by the same yes men and have no idea what it takes to maintain let alone make a fortune. There's really no hope for any form of introspection, accountability or growth.
I'm old enough to remember the Netscape saga. I remember feeling kind of sorry for Marc Andressen who got kinda screwed by the whole netscape deal. By "screwed" I mean he ended up with ~$50M (IIRC) on a deal worth billions. I also remember how the other tech titans of the era were at least ostensibly anti-establishment rebels. "Tech hippies" in a way.
I really wonder what those people would think of the likes of Andressen, Musk, Bezos, Ballmer, Gates, Thiel, etc. All those are objectively awful people who kowtow to the American administration and have essentially just become military contractors who uphold awful ideas like "transhumanism" (which is just eugenics).
But is he wrong? Our company culture rewards psychopaths and sociopaths because they have no conscience. In a way, there's no accountability without a conscience. So it might be a successful strategy in business but it is objectively making the world a worse place. And that ultimately ends with heads on spikes.
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.
Marc Andreessen has been too wealthy for too long, and has lost perspective.
Billionaires are modern day monarchs, divorced from the experience of hoi polloi. I don’t say this (in this present moment) out of simple complaint or sloganeering, though both are easily applied. The argument I’m making is that gaining and/or living with sufficiently ludicrous wealth—orders of magnitude beyond what most of us plebs would retire on—leads _inextricably_ to living a life that is so utterly different that people lose completely the understanding of what the majority of the population actually does with their days. It almost doesn’t matter if the person who gains this level of wealth was “good” or “bad” or whatever qualifier you want to apply.
This isn’t a new or a fresh take. It’s a tale as old as…well, I’m comparing to monarchy. But it bears restating, because the folks that are empowered to make sweeping changes to the systems that we all live under cannot actually relate to what most of those changes feel like. This is less of an individual moral failing than a structural one—though when the structure is being driven by the selfsame individuals, I guess there’s plenty of blame to go around.
It isn’t so surprising that someone raised with generational wealth would have such blinders—and in fact I find that fairly forgivable on the individual basis, though damning of the system that allows that to happen while there’s still people unhoused and unfed.
Perhaps more surprising (and maybe serving as a warning to the rest of us) is that it’s visibly possible to have and to then lose that perspective and ability to relate. This is most visible with folks whose public work precedes their extreme wealth. Jerry Seinfeld still writes comedy—but it doesn’t hit like his earlier works, since there isn’t a shared reality. Our own Paul Graham’s earlier essays have aged, but a fair number of them still ring true; his more recent works barely make a blip here, and with reason.
Marc Andreessen might be right for himself. Or he might be dead wrong. But his advice and writings are effectively useless to the rest of us either way. There’s no shared “there” there.
Is the 1 percenters getting dumber or acting like it?
Like 10 years ago, I felt like Andreesen and Elon were thought leaders. Now they sound like idiots.
Did I or did they change?
Did I grow up and they changed to a younger audience and what I used to enjoy was just a different kind of stupid?
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.
Fair enough. But the software eats the world essay did change the world. Maybe he was lucky, but I still think he managed to position himself in order to be heard with that essay.
Maybe I am naive.
How do you think it changed the world? I don’t think that was an especially prescient thing to say/write at that time. The idea that software was poised to continue to grow in 2011 was pretty obvious to most people. It is true that some companies were undervalued and many VCs and other folks were scarred from the dotcom bust.
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.
It coined a catchy phrase but the essay just described a change that was happening, I don't think it effected any change itself.
You should look into the person Marc hired to research and validate that for him (basically write it) Ro Venkatesh. His essays are quite titilating. And you can immediately see it was Ro's idea not Marc's.
They changed. You wouldn’t believe it but those most impacted by the mental rot that social media can induce - are the ultra wealthy.
Elon was always problematic. His increasing social media use removed the natural filters that prevented people from seeing it.
I honestly think there's more going on here. It seems to be primarily the vain billionaires that are going off the deep end. I experimented with stimulants when I was young and I remember being shocked at how they changed my personality. I went from pretty stoic to wanting to fight people over the slightest perceived insult. I can't help but think these billionaires with their expensive implants, hair and skin treatments, blood boys, etc. are on some life-extending or performance enhancing stimulants that are affecting their state of mind.
I'm not defending Musk, but "problematic" used in this type of context is one of those words that says more about the speaker than it does the subject.
Taking issue with this use of "problematic" says a lot about the speaker too.
I think you can forgive it as a rhetorical device when speaking to a really broad audience.
It seems to me to be saying that the person finds Elon Musk’s behavior problematic. What else are you reading into it?
I feel like taking issue with a word, even when used in a perfectly valid situation, is something worth reflection. Like fair enough if you've heard problematic used in ways you disagree with before, but maybe respond to those comments, not one where you agree with its use. Unless you actually do mean to defend Musk and don't think lying to investors, calling people pedos for saving kids, delaying public infrastructure, doing Nazi salutes, etc. etc. is problematic.
problematic is a meaningless word, be more specific
I have a tangential theory to this.
Being rich != being famous. There are tons of extremely wealthy people out there that keep a very low profile. Sure they might be well known within their circle but ask the average person and they have no clue who that person is. I would say this is the case for like 90-95% of billionaires.
Musk, Andreessen, Zuck and others were all in this camp 10 years ago but they all decided that simply being rich wasn't enough, they wanted to be famous. These folks have all the resources and connections to become famous so they can get on all the podcasts, write op-eds, and are guaranteed to get the best reach on social media and thus the most eyeballs on their content and the most attention paid to them.
But when you go from making a few media appearances a year to constantly making media appearances in one way or another is that you need more "content" so to speak. Just like a comedian needs more content if they are going to do a 1hr special versus a 10min set at a comedy club.
The problem for all these guys is they have a few genuinely insightful ideas mixed in with a ton of cooky and out of touch ideas. Before they could safely stick to the genuinely insightful ideas but as they've made more and more appearances, they have to reach for some of those other ideas. They don't realize that their cooky ideas sound very different than their few insightful ideas. They think all their ideas are insightful based on the feedback they have been getting for the past decade or so.
I need to reread it but Paul Fussell makes the case that old wealth is inconspicuous and secure (and maybe inherited) versus nouveau riche which is about visible luxury, branding, and showy consumption. I don't remember if he mentions the need to promote ideas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class:_A_Guide_Through_the_Ame...
Paul Fussel’s Class was an interesting read
I think Musk definitely financed many of his ventures on his personal brand. The amount of capital he could raise because of his public persona as some kind of Tony Stark, made all the difference.
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.
There's also differences between fame, infamy, popularity and elite social status, which is probably not all that clear to newly-minted billionaires that are already lacking in the social skills department.
I often wonder if tech billionaire psychosis might lead to a "Great Filter" event for our species. They have entirely unchecked power, lack of empathy, and gleeful ignorance of everything our species has done that their success rests upon.
I doubt that. The only thing social media removed was scruples and shame. People were ashamed to say such dumb things and now they think they have some kind of deeper knowledge.
Their thinking didn’t change.
I think they also suddenly had to deal with a bunch of people being mean to them, and telling them they were wrong, which drove them a little mad.
Sort of an oppositional defiant thing, filtered through immense wealth and power
After one becomes wealthy, social media easily becomes the only place where anyone says no to them. When everyone who surrounds you tells you "you're absolutely right, let me get that for you", you atrophy the muscle that let's you course correct when you're making a mistake, and when someone disagrees with you it feels that much stronger.
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.
This. I remember many a time pmarca getting so upset and just blocking everyone who disagreed with him on Twitter. It was the weirdest thing.
Blocking people that annoy him on Twitter is the only humanizing thing about him. Deciding that someone has annoyed you enough on that platform that you don't care to ever hear from them ever again is the only thing that made that platform usable when you have any minimal audience.
"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.
They can finally say "retard" openly. They have been openly gloating about this! So yes, I agree: previously they felt constrained. They no longer do.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
My theories:
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.
> 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?
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...)
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 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.
> 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. ... 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.
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.
I believe in some form of the Twitter poisoning theory:
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.
I think people get dumber as they age. I feel like I'm probably dumber than me 10 years ago. No one wants to admit it, but I sense it in myself and I think I can see it in other people. I feel like peak brain is probably like 22 years old if we are being honest. Yeah you might still be doing dumb kid stuff but you are at the age where you just have this energizer bunny inside. You can just go to the library and churn multiple all day and night sessions. Sleep in one day and perfectly recovered. I "know" more now but I'm definitely slower than when I was younger.
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.
> I feel like peak brain is probably like 22 years old
Ah, but peak wisdom? Much later.
Only because we don't allow ourselves to get serious until we hit like 25 years old imo, and only barely then. Imagine a 22 year old raised among Shaolin monks. Probably would be the wisest person you will ever meet.
I'm not sure. There's value from teachings, but there's a certain type of wisdom that only comes from lived experience. Kind of like in software development - a new grad can read Designing Data Intensive Systems and memorize all the answers for "design Facebook/Twitter/YouTube/etc." interview questions, but someone who actually built a platform with millions of users is going to have a different level of understanding. In my life, I can say that no amount of learning from others prepared me for what I learned about myself during my first relationship.
All the more reason to start earlier, so you have more lived experience on the job by your mental peak at 22. Instead your lived experience is playing Halo or something like that by that point. Or wasting time flipping burgers. Wish I could have dumped all the hours I did in restaurant work in highschool into research. The door was shut though until I got into undergrad even though I was a hard worker and could have picked it up then. A lot of parallels between food service and lab work, I learned after the fact.
Ah if you look at it from the perspective of doing research or other deep intellectual work by 22, I can see your point. Certainly if that is the peak of human mental capability (not something I can argue for or against but I'll take it as true) you ideally would pursue a focused education up to that point that allows you to dive deep into a challenging problem. IMO this is different from wisdom however, and in fact pursuing the variety of experiences and interactions with others that you need to build wisdom will distract from the focus on your research subject.
I certainly thought I was smarter when I was younger.
Are you saying you haven't felt increased mental fatigue and "slowness" while aging? What is your secret? Certain supplements? Blood boy?
These people are almost unimaginably wealthy to the point where they're effectively unchallenged if they're not directly challenging the state (and even then they win quite a few rounds). "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
You realized they were always shitheels. Musk was a complete visible fraud long before 2016.
Elon is a social dumbass with the emotional maturity of an edgy 14 year old boy, but calling him a fraud I'd say is false and unproductive.
> Elon is a social dumbass with the emotional maturity of an edgy 14 year old boy, but calling him a fraud I'd say is false and unproductive.
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.
He is absolutely a fraud. He has been lying about many things for more than a decade to boost his stock. He has more in common with Trevor Milton than anyone else.
He's been lying through his teeth for the better part of two decades, "fraud" is true and productive.
Obnoxious, egocentric, very low EQ, and with almost no moral values, absolutely. Fraud? Not sure. He did make a lot of outlandish predictions, but on the other hand, Tesla revolutionized EVs (forcing everyone to follow suit), and SpaceX revolutionized space tech. He can't take credit for the technical achievements in either, but he did have the tenacity to push both through. Can't say many other people would have done that.
Indeed, he always seems like an obnoxious media attention whore to me long before he got into politics.
I tend to have a negative view of celebrities who did cameos for the Simpsons far past its peak lol
Thinking any one person is a 'thought leader' is, generally, a dumb thing to think.
You grew up.
You definitely got wiser—we all do—but I think there’s also a big shift in both what they think they can say safely in public and the sycophantic reinforcement they get on social media. Rich guys have always had that problem to some extent but it used to be less public—nothing like Musk just tossing out some inane insight while high and getting hundreds of thousands of fans applauding. Human brains don’t handle that well, and you can tell these guys haven’t had to defend an idea rigorously in years.
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.
I remember when Elon came up with the hyper loop idea and everybody I worked with at the time thought it was revolutionary. These were very smart people who were fooled.
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.
Anyone who assumes they won't be fooled is setting themselves up for disaster.
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.)
> Hype can drown out valid criticism
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.
I genuinely don't know how the mental model of such a person works where they look at Elon who got multiple world changing bets right but they focus on the ones that were wrong.
I feel like a lot of the ideas are over-attributed to him. Tesla already existed, electric cars aren't really a revolutionary idea. He's a hype man and he does the hype stuff well. Cybertruck was a pretty unmitigated disaster. self-driving is not really working out as he promised. I still remember arguing with people in 2020 who thought you'd be able to sleep in your car in a few years. Seems like Waymo is beating them to robo-taxis. Hyperloop was a bad idea.
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.
I really dislike Elon as a person, but didn't the hyperloop POC work? I admittedly haven't followed it in long time.
Definitely not. The companies that were prototyping it all went bankrupt. The "Vegas Loop" is just a tunnel with Tesla car traffic in it and I don't even think they're fully self driving! Very very underwhelming. Not even remotely close to the "NY to DC in 29 minutes" which he promised.
We would have been much better off with investment in tried-and-true boring old trains.
A bit of both. You became more attuned to what really does and does not make sense and they rotted a bit further. But 10 years ago it was pretty visible for both Musk and Andreessen.
>Did I or did they change?
>>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.
Money can buy greater latitude with mistakes. Mistakes that would have been career ending for low level employee, is an amusing anecdote to be remembered at a gathering or in a book.
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 ).
A decade ago wasn't Musk talking about Hyperloop? He sounded like an idiot to many people then, too. His companies were good at the time but once he talked about anything else I feel like it was pretty clear who he was.
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.
> A decade ago wasn't Musk talking about Hyperloop?
Yep, and he claimed that he would colonize Mars soon.
The way I suspect they think is this. A pyramid is always going to be there, it is better we reinforce and consolidate our power at top with the friendlies below and make it sound like that is the best option for everyone.
The question is what you think now of their old opinions. If you think the same, they have changed. If you think differently, you have changed.
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.
All the rich are on ketamine.
They got radicalized, which was intensional from the right. Further, wealth and time has shifted the hippy ethos of the valley to libertarianism.
It’s amazing how often becoming rich makes one into a libertarian :)
They've just become hype-men for their own investments.
When you reach a certain level of wealth and power, it seems like it’s very easy to surround yourself with people who only tell you how brilliant and successful you are.
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.
IMO they were always the way that they are now, they just didn't broadcast it in public.
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.
'Thought leader' has always been a code word for 'bullshit artist'.
There's the whole "billionaire bubble" thing, where they get surrounded by folks who have an economic interest in keeping the billionaire happy... but I'd posit there's another big change -- tech billionaires didn't used to have any cultural or political juice. This meant that even if they had some weird / bad takes, they kept them quiet.
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.
I think they miscalculated though. Their vile views still aren't acceptable, they just get broadcasted more now.
This won't have the effect they hope for. It'll just expose them as the frauds they are.
To add to the answers given already, there's the matter of the sheer scale of wealth these people have (especially relative to e.g. median worker wages). The richest people on earth in the 80s were a bunch of discreet Japanese CEOs with 5 or 6 billion$ to their name. They were very rich, sure, and surely could influence politics with their wealth.
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.
A little bit of both? I don't think they were thought leaders but they were often correct and also at the right point in time.
Also, power corrupts. That's a tale as old as time, I have found no evidence that somehow tech-bros are immune to it.
They have always been dumb. Richistan describes the pure unalloyed depravity the rich live in really well:
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
It's both. Back then[0], the ultra-wealthy had whole teams of PR managers - people devoted to doing the verbal equivalent of making sure they were lit with perfect 5500K portrait lighting at every angle. In other words, DLSS 5 but for personality. In order to sustain that kind of shitty magic trick, the PR team needs to completely control everything they say. This is a lot of effort.
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.
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.
> as ideas worth listening to, on any topic.
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.
Also a product of the US stock market going up and to the right for the last couple of decades. It's very easy to convince yourself that you are some great perceptor of the world because you've been getting 30% CAGR on your portfolio for the last few many years.
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.
I very much agree with your first paragraph. But then to say you could just simply invest in "in any Stanford/Berkeley/MIT person who walked through your doors, it was impossible to end up in the red." is the kind of non-reflective and overly simplistic thinking you are criticizing.
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.
If you had just invested in any provably smart person with a software idea, it was very hard to lose (in sum) in the last 15 years. I don't think it's too simplistic. That's just how crazy the US tech industry has been over the last two decades.
>The majority of investors even in this boom also failed.
No? My point was the majority succeeded. If you had any sort of diversification, it was hard to end up with a loss.
Anti intellectualism is also falling into the local optima trap of “rich people bad” that a lots of people seem to fall into. The idea that rich people have something to say is so alien that no deeper analysis is warranted.
> The idea that rich people have something to say
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.
> 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.
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.
> The rich got rich exactly by contributing to society and humanity.
Pardon me, but this seems to be a local optima trap too.
The difference is, I know the extent to which this is true and where it fails. I don't think you even acknowledge this is largely true.
Is it true? Even on a small scale, when I taught kids how to swim for $20k/year I believe I did more for society than when I built systems to help a large streaming service deliver ads for $100k/year. There are certainly exceptions, but in general money comes from extracting value from others, while jobs that provide to society are not extractive and this pay less.
This is fundamentally wrong. If Elon created Tesla and made ~$100B of wealth from it, he also made all the other shareholders richer by way more. Not only that - the world now has Teslas it otherwise wouldn't. Everyone wins and there is no extraction of values (old Marxist jargon that needs to go away).
goes both ways. elitism exists on both ends of the spectrum. the academic side is largely the same thing except it's attained from years of schooling through certain pedagogues that tout the one true way and if you haven't been through that wringer, then your understanding doesn't count. true intellectualism, has humility and the everlasting honest pursuit for truth. neither of these extremes have this quality.
No, I don't think it's the same thing at all. For many intellectual fields, I'd say having an academic degree (or a degree's equivalent of knowledge) in the subject is more-or-less required to have an intelligent, novel opinion on the subject.
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.
> 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
I already replied to another comment that claimed the same thing.
> when analyzed by actual philosophers.
Kind of proving his point a little
I don’t think competence implies elitism. On many topics, everyone’s opinion isn’t equal. I wouldn’t trust a random person’s opinion on civil engineering; philosophy in the sense of the specific field of philosophy (metaphysics, ethics, etc.) is no different. The effects are just more abstract.
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.
there's a fine line between competence and elitism. competence usually has direct measurable impact with ego. elitism is 0 impact, and all ego.
I don’t really know what this is supposed to mean, but it’s pretty vague and content free.
I've had experience in a couple academic insitutions and among hundreds of faculty I've met, only three were real elitist assholes. Known among the departments as such too. But hey, they bring in the grant money, so people let them continue to run toxic labs. At least their sub pis are usually decent people.
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.
Am I understanding you correctly that you believe that all of academia has aligned behind "one true way?"
nope, you're definitely not understanding me correctly.
>This whole scenario is just the logical conclusion of American anti-intellectualism.
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.
I'm not talking about fawning, I'm talking about taking the "intellectual" thoughts of rich people as seriously as academics/intellectuals. The notion of taking John Rockefeller's ideas on metaphysics seriously would have been seen as strange by his contemporaries.
What's kind of unique about the US is the way poor or middle-class people idolize the rich. As the saying goes, everyone feels like a temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
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.
Agreed it is not new. But it is taken to a new level.
It's also become a huge business, with endless "business thought leader" books and podcasts that have very little substance.
Mark Andreessen is the manifstation of "fooled by randomness". An idiot that got lucky, now thinks he is a god.
I've worked with a couple people who got rich during dot-com era. They had the same "I'm right about everything" vibe.
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
He's not that old.
He was born in 1971 according to Wikipedia [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen
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 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.
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.
You have got it right (though IDK what you mean by unity and zero), the author is even less well read than Andreesen so their arguments make no sense since they don't have this background.
There some work on it in Fanged Noumena. The Kant essay at the beginning is definitely the most intelligible, but they are all good.
“It tires me to talk to rich men. You expect a man of millions, the head of a great industry, to be a man worth hearing; but as a rule they don't know anything outside their own business.”
- Teddy Roosevelt
Often I'm not even entirely convinced they know a lot about their own business either. It seems like the ones who make the cartoonishly large amounts of money are the ones who got lucky to hire decent people early on.
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.
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.
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.
That’s simply not what introspection is, though.
Introspection is the conscious examination of one’s own mental, emotional, and cognitive processes to improve self-awareness. I think Marc's critique here is a lot of what can be learned about past mistakes is outside of an individual's own failings.
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.
You are right, a simpler way to frame it is: Marc is not anti introspection but post introspection in that there's something beyond introspection. The author seems to have made an uncharitable take for easy virality.
Why does he need to make a historical justification for it then? It would be disingenuous if, as the blog author suggests, Andreessen knows better.
People have been doing self-examination for a long time, but Freud's use of psychoanalysis is a fairly modern phenomenon and it's benefits are dubious. Modern therapy looks increasingly like pseudoscience. I expect biotech/AI advancements to make much of modern therapy irrelevant over time, as we obtain fine-grained control over the actual processes in the brain causing various afflictions.
modern therapy has nothing to with Freud, modern therapy approaches are empirically tested, and show efficacy comparable to medication, but sure other than that whole modern scientific approach... its definitely just pseudoscience
the only pseudoscience you mentioned is the idea that mental "afflictions" are entirely biological
For sure Freud and modern therapy as practiced today are very different. Freud influenced the language, structure, and goals of talk therapy more than the exact methods most therapists use now. Modern therapy kept many of his clinical observations about inner conflict and relationships, but dropped or revised a lot of his more speculative theory.
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.
> empirically tested
Doesn't really matter when most of the results are unreproducible.
> “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.
Technologists used to be smart, now they just have money.
And the people that fawn all over every single word they say think they'll eventually have the same money as well. But in the end they'll just be dumber.
Fawning over rich people is bad. But hating them is okay? How about engaging with the material itself instead of focusing on the bank accounts?
Isn't this whole comment section about engaging with the material itself and disagreeing with it? I don't see anybody here saying that Andreessen's ideas are bad specifically because he has money, they are saying the ideas he has are bad and he has money and that's probably letting him get away with broadcasting terrible ideas.
> Technologists used to be smart
but were they, as a whole, ever wise?
The problem is that we have made the latter condition an alias for the former.
Redefining competence and intelligence as "ability to make money" has done untold damage to American society.
I have a personal belief that this is a result of the "can-do" attitude that pervades not only American society currently; but virtually all of American history.
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.
Well, yes and no. A can do attitude is needed to imagine taking over fighting a global British empire. All around the world people needed to muster up that courage. That said, equating the outcome of that with smartness was bound to happen. That said, they leadership got co-opted by money outcomes is where the downfall happened, IMO
Political elites in a vast colony far from the empire’s center gambled that the empire did not have the will to grind out an expensive victory against fellow elites. This proved to be correct.
I think there's something to this. And while America has always had this can-do attitude (just look at the number of self help books), it does seem to be in another gear recently. I don't know what caused it, but I think there have been a number of indicators: Trump ignoring Congress and introducing wild tariffs, Musk firing half of Twitter's staff and then later repeating this with DOGE, the quick roll-out of LLMs. There seems to be this prevailing attitude of "we can just do stuff, damn the consequences".
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.
Venture capitalists have never been smart and have always had money
Poker players with a blog. No one ever has a difficult problem and thinks, damn, maybe I should ask a VC.
andreesen didnt always have money
I'm curious how Andreessen came to this motto. Introspection is just a feedback loop, where you evaluate your actions, and adjust for when going forward. Not too unlike a control loop.
Maybe the current AI landscape is a symptom of that mentality - that everyone should just pour as much money and resources into it, never look back, never measure, just keep pushing forward. If you start asking questions, you're in doubt. If you're in doubt, you're a roadblock for progression.
It's a shame, anyone who's dumb enough to believe Marc Andreessen, isn't going to be smart enough to read this article.
Of course he is. In fact in that same podcast Andreessen makes a point using historical evidence and what is history but collective introspection?
I do agree that too much introspection can be negative and that it's hard or even impossible to understand your decisions and motives until some time has passed.
> Host David Senra, apparently delighted, congratulated Andreessen on developing what he called a "zero-introspection mindset."
It's easy to have a zero-introspection mindset if the consequences of having zero introspection are absorbed by the many zeroes on Andreessen's bank account.
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.
Introspection is not doomscrolling though. Being tugged around by short-lived stimuli from a feed is the opposite of deep self-reflection.
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.
> I often read the news, feel miserable about the state of the world...
This isn't introspection.
I think this conclusion in itself is more introspection than reading the news. After all most news events are external and whether you read about them or not doesn't make any difference. Its really more the opposite of introspection.
I mean, being aware of that (and adjusting behavior for it) is a form of introspection.
Without introspection you'd just dive into the pit.
Or worse, you wouldn't even know about it!
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.
What do you mean by "high agency"?
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 few hundred years ago introspection wasn't all that common
Marcus Aurelius, Napoleon, Lincoln, the founding fathers, and a long slate of writers and philosophers would like a word
You are again making the same mistake, please try to understand what I'm saying. Atheism was a known concept at least amongst some priestly class in India but that didn't matter - the larger part of the society was not developed enough to understand it.
Society only meaningfully changes when a critical mass of people understand and apply a concept - in this case introspection.
> a few hundred years ago introspection wasn't all that common
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.
>Early death, however, was common. What's your point?
I wrote my point clearly: not enough of the society had an introspective mindset for society to be meaningfully influenced by it
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 was reading Martin Luther's wiki article the other day:
"Johann von Staupitz, his superior and frustrated confessor, concluded that Luther needed more work to distract him from excessive introspection and ordered him to pursue an academic career" [1]
basically he was a moody college student
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther
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.
Mark Andreessen is an idiot, a guy fooled by randomness.
To be fair, Marc Andreessen is wrong about many things.
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.
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.
Non-introspection is a fantastic source of strategic vulnerability. It can facilitate a bias to action which has it's clear value. However, if you are creating a highly valuable asset then it puts you in a position where you are extremely easy to manipulate and harvest. Perhaps this serves VCs quite well.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_thyself
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?
You're absolutely right! His sentence about not really needing introspection and the right approach being "Move forward. Go." should be read as the Zen koan it is and carefully introspected on. This is the secret of enlightenment. True enlightenment is no-mind: it's not just zero introspection, it's zero of every dualistic craving. Pure action, without anyone being "there" to act: it's about walking the path, not just sitting and reflecting on it.
Does it include zero of money?
Edit: the comment above said 'zero of everything', but it was edited.
I think Andreessen's comments were borne of hyperbole and as a (deliberate) overcorrection against certain Bay Area rationalist types whose 10,000 word navel gazing screeds border on schizoidal personality disorder.
I have watched these people expend literally years getting into hypothetical arguments with strawmen they believe are active participants in their community when, at best, they are occasional lurkers, and will erect entire superstructures of theory and belief that make utterly no sense to those outside of their rationalist cult.
Lesswrong and motteizen type users fall squarely into this category, who also tend to cleave towards the pro-AI side of the spectrum now that, as with the rest of their lives, they are able to delegate the production of logorrhea at scale to the machine.
These people are mentally unwell, and reading their proclamations is not too dissimilar to browsing a deep web trans community discussing esoteric gender theory, or even merely the slashdot comment section in 2016 - just with an extra ten paragraphs of fluff and vapidity as if they had been fed on a steady diet of the New Yorker; none of which has any correlation whatsoever to material sensate reality. No wonder there is such reverence for the hyperreality of LLM literary hallucination in these circles...
Sent from my iPhone
So not only is he not wrong, he's a keen social critic?
Personally I cleave to the extremes of the hyperintrospective portion of the spectrum, so no, I think taken at face value his comments are absurd.
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.
But why give him credit for subtext for which there's no apparent evidence? By all appearances he's saying this stuff in earnest. Why does it need to be "encoded"?
Why not give him credit? If you read his other work and the background, all this stuff is obvious.
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where–” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“–so long as I get SOMEWHERE,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”
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.
Which makes me curious about what Marc actually meant. The quote itself raises eyebrows.
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
>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
Not worth a blog post, lets a comment to warm up my fingers.
Andressen has demonstrated he is past his prime; he is no longer relevant. We should stop giving his opinions space.
No one knows what it means, but it's provocative… gets the people going!
> Marc Andreessen was right about web browsers.
Actually, what about web browsers was he right about?
That they'd become a platform as much as operating systems are.
Marc Andreessen is wrong about a lot of things.
A fair chunk of the population literally does not have an inner monologue. Genetics, maybe.
Perhaps Mark is one of those people, and simply lacks the capability to effectively introspect, and he's trying to turn that into a flex.
> Marc Andreessen was right about web browsers.
>But he has since been wrong about a great many things.
Basically summarizes any billionaire. Society still seems to drink the kool-aid of billionaires. People think a guy has a billion dollars because he’s a genius. In all cases it was some small amount of intelligence with a whole lot of luck.
My hope is in the decades to come we wake up to the fact these guys are lucky wealth-hoarders and they get too much time on every podcast you can think of.
It's also worth looking at where Andreeson seats the origin of harmful introspection - in turn of the last century Vienna, with Freud. That is to say, introspection is a product of Judeo-bolshivism, created by the Jews to sap Aryan man of his natural vitality and dominance. It's sick, but it's just another example, along with the admiration of Italian Futurism, of how Andreeson has immersed himself in a fascist milieu.
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).
His statements about this were purely politics, and nothing more. He himself does not believe this. It's political revisionism.
I agree he could be doing political revisionism. But I fail to grasp, why?
To appear as a strongman in the eyes of those in power, those who are clearly incapable of introspection. And by such moves he himself gains power.
Yes, precisely. That's also why his argument includes Freud - as a Judeo-bolshivism dogwhistle.
Counterpoint -- Yes he's wrong and obviously so. But is some rich dude saying something stupid worthy of platforming?
It almost feels to me like acting as though a famous person being gasp wrong about something is implicitly suggesting that this is somehow surprising?
We should be surprised and write essays when the smartest people we know say something silly. Just because somebody's bank account has some zeroes in it doesn't mean it should be worthy of our focus.
> But is some rich dude saying something stupid worthy of platforming?
The rich dude saying the stupid thing was platformed. This is defense.
These people have profoundly inflated egos, platforming them if only for the express purpose of mocking them mercilessly in front of the entire world is absolutely worth it.
These people are insanely powerful forces in the modern world. Of course we should talk about them (and usually how Wrong, shortsighted, and self-serving they are).
Yes. They need to be platforms and shamed to hell. Otherwise they thrive in shadows like the ghouls they are.
Let me fix that for you. Marc Andreessen is wrong. There is the whole broken clock analogy though...
I'm not sure he's entirely wrong.
I have a theory that a large fraction of the population is not conscious. They go about their lives, they still work and think and have emotions in some form, but they don't actually experience. In other words, they're P-zombies. (Note: I do NOT support any actual action based on this idea. This certainly doesn't suggest that it would be morally acceptable to do anything to that group that wouldn't be acceptable to do to the rest.)
This is by analogy to mental imagery. For a long time, there was a debate over whether people actually saw mental imagery in some real sense, or whether it was just a way of describing more symbolic thought. These days the general consensus seems to be that it varies, where someone might see extremely lifelike images, or more vague images, or none at all.
Since it's all about internal experience, people had a hard time understanding that their experience wasn't necessarily the same as everyone else's. The same might be true of consciousness.
This started out as mostly a joke or a thought experiment, but more and more I'm thinking it might actually be true. Statements like Andreessen's really push me in that direction. It's such a baffling statement... unless Andreessen is a P-zombie, then it makes perfect sense. And if he is, he probably thinks this whole consciousness idea is just a weird analogy for perception, and thinks we're a bunch of weirdos for acting like his statement isn't something obvious.
Is this AI slop? In any case I hate writing that is "subject predicate object" that makes the whole article feel as obnoxious like a Twitter thread.
Write better sentences, please!
First we had techno-oligarchs attacking empathy, now they are attacking introspection?
What's the endgame here?
As a billionaire you can afford to just go, because unlike us mortals you are shielded from all consequences. It's also why the tech moguls are now called oligarchs. Because they kind of are.
Apparently Andreessen is an ignorant fool. Seems par for the course with these tech oligarch asshats.
Only at least since the ancient Greeks has introspection been relevant (and even the Renaissance was well established 400 years ago in the 1600s):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_unexamined_life_is_not_wor...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_thyself
The problem with certain intellectual pursuits is that it becomes its own little sub culture with its own little sub culture celebrities.
You see, High School never ended. Things can still get lame in the “real world”. The “geeks” need to shut up and go back to the geek table and be more humble. The whole lot of us have demonstrated limited ability on how to be decent.
To quote Rick James:
”They should have never given you developers money. Fuck your Ping Pong table, fuck. Your. Ping. Pong. Table!”
This whole debate is pretty weird and misguided, IMO. Marc Andreesen can be right about what works for him. Joan Westenberg can be right about what works for her. This would be obvious to a five year old. This whole brouhaha seems to be merely the setting for HN'ers (and everyone else) to continue their ongoing battles about how the world should and must be and why "the other side" is Wrong. Search through the comments here. Somehow Elon, Luigi Magnione, and Trump are pulled into the discussion.
Andreesen donated $5M to the Trump campaigns. So attaching Trump's name to Andreesen seems fair.
The problem is with the media pouring endless attention on these tech bros and bestowing the mantel of expertise in every field on them - philosophy, politics, religion, sociology.
So now they spout their mouth off and the media hangs on their every word and debates it.
Marc Andreessen is wrong about many things that may be worth arguing against, but not here: this was completely idiotic take that doesn't deserve anything but contempt.
And it's not like you could convinced his followers that this take is wrong, anyone gullible enough to take such an insane take at face value is very unlikely to read your rebuttal.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but if my head were shaped that way, I wouldn't want to look inside it either.
Yes this is a stupid idea, but commentators are forgetting everyone has stupid ideas. I would imagine the vast majority of commentators in this thread hold one, like
- Socialism / Communism is a good idea - Functional or OOP programming is a good idea - LLM's will replace programmers - Languages like Javascript, Typescript, or Python are actually good and should be used - 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
Throw tabs or spaces in there, emacs/vim, and a dose of religion and you have a complete rage bait.
Ignore all the techno bros on everything but their field of expertise.
It's not like they don't have a right to an opinion, but it's usually outsized, aggrandized nonsense.
Rare Book + Ego + a few thoughts on a long walk = Insufferable Twitter Nonsense
Imagine taking advice from VC instead of their money.
Well, isn't this the whole point of YC?
I guess even HN needs two minutes of hate. Andreessen is an easy target.
This notion that CEOs are geniuses is just patently false. They are average, and mostly distinguish themselves only in their arrogance and avarice. I would bet the IQ of the average HN reader to be higher than the average C-Suite exec.
> Marc Andreessen was right about web browsers.
> But he has since been wrong about a great many things.
This is true for almost all of the tech bros / influencers / CEOs. Being right once and getting rich does not make them smarter or better than anyone. Unfortunately our society doesn‘t view it that way - hence here we are, stuck with the Elons and Thiels of the world. And it‘s hurting us yet they’re on a pedestal
Ha, we both reacted to the same 2 sentences in a very similar way at basically the same time!
Exactly. They just happened to be there at the start of the wave and bam they're geniuses. No they're just greedy a-holes and leeches!
He’s right in that business success is largely correlated with sociopathy, it helps you focus on the goal of maximizing your own wealth without worrying about the messy details of how other human beings are affected.
Going back four hundred years, it would have never occurred to anyone that humans shouldn’t be slaves or that the environment will be irrecoverably destroyed if everyone pillages it for their own business needs.
> Going back four hundred years, it would have never occurred to anyone that humans shouldn’t be slaves…
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"!)
Andreesen and I are both talking about trends, not that literally no one thought of introspection or the immorality of slavery four hundred years ago
Andreesen: “If you go back, like, 400 years ago, it never would have occurred to anybody to be introspective."
You: "it would have never occurred to anyone that humans shouldn’t be slaves"
Come on. Words have meaning.
I was echoing Andreesen's phrasing to make it more clear what I'm responding to, but whatever, enjoy your pedantic dunk.
> 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.
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.
Well a lot of Eastern religions do talk about sustainability 1000s of years back. Just because it was never part of Abrahamic faiths and their offshoot cultures which took over the world, does not mean that humans did not think this way
I think that is too little credit to previous humans: people objecting to slavery were around four hundred and more years ago. Similarly, concerns about environmental destruction are also old.
We all know he’s wrong. The problem isn’t that he is wrong, it’s that we have elevated the wealthy into a status where they can be wrong, have no correction, and make decisions whole clothe which negatively affect the rest of us. All while being insulated from their negative world view.
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
How is this flame bait when it specifically addresses both the title and the content of the article?
It is a criticism of a right leaning figure. Same rules apply as when the queen died. Free discussion is allowed as long as it is not criticism.
Tim Dillon said summarized it pretty well - can't remember or find the exact quote. Something to the effect of:
"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.
What I took from the video game thing is that he thought he could fool people.
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.
This is made even more interesting by the fact that musk was caught misrepresenting himself playing the computer game Diablo in the not-so-distant past. IIRC he was either buying accounts or paying someone else to stream on his behalf. [0]
[0]https://fortune.com/2025/01/20/elon-musk-video-games-scandal...
Also in sort of stark contrast to the "here's my elden ring build", which was pretty incoherent, and so was believed to be actually his.
> 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 worse than that: he thinks the point of playing games is to be number 1 in the world.
> In their minds, financial success is the ultimate yardstick.
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.
That may or may not be true in aggregate, but for extreme outliers it's impossible to separate from survivorship bias. Are Musk and Andreeson really the most skilled entrepreneurs in the world or are they just good enough for luck to propel them to stratospheric success?
They found luck and success and continue to compound that. However it's easy to make so much money when you have that much already. Just promise the world or invest in companies that do and ride unicorns with private investments into the sunset. The risk they take now is very low.
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.
> Just promise the world or invest in companies that do and ride unicorns with private investments into the sunset.
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.
They’re just the most ruthless
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
That's not how humans came to populate areas that previously were dominated by predators who would be obviously deadly to individual humans. Cooperation and planning are what made physically weak humans dominant. That cooperation and planning developed and flourished without authoritarian structures.
Tribal chiefs are not authoritarians? Because basically every Stone Age village has one.
A brief look at certain native American tribes might show quite a lot of talking and consensus building, like if some war chief wants a war he needs to drum up support for that. Hours of talking ensue! Not to say that ancient tribes didn't have the worst of what modern corporations have to offer as far as leadership goes, but a claim "basically every village" is basically wrong, or "bascially" is carrying a heck of a lot of weight.
Read some Charles Mann. Tribal leaders if they can really be described as leaders had to work with consensus and cooperation. Modern society is much more coercive.
Sure, but this argument doesn't actually invalidate the parent at all.
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.
>Cost gates what we can do and become. Paying back your costs to extend your runway
You don't even need an amazing job to do that though
Oh come on. So you're rooting for the evil genius in the comic book movie? You would harm millions of people to move up the financial success yardstick?
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.
If you were to make a list of the most important people in history how different would it be from the list of the richest people in history?
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?
No. it certainly isn't.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5jI9I03q8E
I have yet to check the prediction markets for this proposition but I would bet on Peter Thiel being the first one to mistake a fancy cup for the Holy Grail.
The curse of fame is really underappreciated. Rich and famous people obviously never talk about it in public as it is going against the narrative that builds their brands, but they feel it. They are so jealous of the quietly rich who no one will recognize. Who can still live the same life as you and I. They really are trapped. They basically have to fall of the face of the earth and age out of their appearance to have a chance of obscurity. And their line of work makes that impossible.
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.
OK, but ... imagine Andreessen said, "I don't eat food."
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.
I feel like your comment is evidence that you are insufficiently acquainted with various flavors of cult-like behavior and wingnuttery. There are in fact people who sincerely believe that you don't have to eat [1], who believe it so fervently that they risk and sometimes lose their lives for that belief.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inedia
Are you kidding? People would eat that up if he said that. Soylent would sell like crazy. You'd see protein smoothie shops pop up all over the bay area. For better or worse there is a subset of people who just lap up at whatever comes out of these people's mouth.
You say financial success as though it is completely independent of pretty much everything. "How could I be wrong, look how handsome I am"
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?
> Some people fall ass backwards into money through luck, but that's rare
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.
The greatest philosophers are rarely the wealthiest people. Wealth generally comes from being presented with opportunities, putting in the work to make the most of those opportunities, and being lucky enough that they end up being good. Intelligence can be an asset here, but bigger assets are knowing people already in positions of power, already having resources you can leverage, and being willing sacrifice years of your life in pursuit of wealth. Those factors don't require you to be well reasoned, logical, or intelligent.
I think Marc might be referring to "navel gazing". If introspection is so important, we wouldn't need to do experiments to figure out what is reality. He could be advocating for Empiricism. You will find quotes like "If unsure, take a decision and make it right later. Don't get trapped in analysis paralysis". Basically two camps are fighting here : those who think reality can be figured out by thinking alone. and those who think we need to get out there and collect data and analyse it. I am personally biased toward Radical Conversatism.
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.
Hmm, I think this statement needs some support "To create great wealth in a vibrant capitalist society you have to have some model about the world you can exploit."
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?
> To create great wealth in a vibrant capitalist society you have to have some model about the world you can exploit.
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.
I think the answer for most people is one of "I wasn't dealt the right hand of cards by fate" and/or "I don't want to spend my life acting like a sociopath and exploiting others for a small chance at great wealth."
that's pretty rich coming from Tim "They're paying me enough to ignore slavery" Dillon.
Also doesn't help that wealth means they can own newspapers or social media to promote their shitty takes as gospel, and have armies of regular Joe fanbois, that kiss their ass and tell us how wise they are...
I really don't think he thought it was equivalent, he was just larping and thought he could trick people.
> The fact that they have so much wealth is a testament that their way of thinking is always right.
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.
>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.
HN posters are famously overconfident, sure, but wealth is a bad measure of success. Putin is one of the richest people on earth, but responsible for extreme political repression and global instability. Pablo Escobar did very well financially. Financial success says how well you’ve extracted wealth from others, and approximately zero about your contributions to society.
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.
> wealth is a bad measure of[...]your contributions to society
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.
Thank you for illustrating another feature of the billionaires' defensive bubble: anyone who dares criticize them from a position of lesser wealth is just "jealous" and their criticism is presumptively invalid.
There is obviously some minimum level of competence and intelligence required to be wealthy (not losing all of it), but for many becoming fabulously wealthy is as much a matter of circumstance than anything else. I would guess most people here would also be billionaires if they had the same opportunities and circumstances as Musk.
I don't think there's a minimum level of competence even. You can get very wealthy by sheer luck and timing.
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.
This reminds of me the following wonderful Numberphile video [1] where they compare the success of billionares to gas molecules: "everybody is just bumping around randomly but the one person that, you know, that became a billionare or something--they wrote their autobiography 'how I got here, all the great decisions I made to beat everybody'... It was just random." I've always wondered whether it would be possible to compute the expected number of billionaires with a model like this. If the number is higher than the expectation, well ok, some fraction of them are consciously steering themselves into billionaire-hood. Otherwise, it's probably dumb luck. It's a fun null hypothesis.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvwgdrC8vlE&t=57s
Everyone thinks they are right, but it’s having the grace to be able learn, be wrong and develop is the point here! Also your average HN commenter does not get listened to or promoted anywhere to the same degree!
The reason he and Musk are anti-introspection is that when they do it, it hurts. Because they are terrible people.
Better to just not think about it.
It says a lot that he thinks that empathy is the greatest human weakness.
One of many, many, many stupid things he's said.
In one interview, Mush called it the "empathy exploit".
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.
Not just stupid, sociopathic. Definitionally.
You don't generally reach that level of wealth and success without at least having strong sociopathic (maybe even psychopathic) tendencies.
that's a stretch: andreessen got wealthy because he worked for the UIUC group in a project which turned out super popular, super funded by Jim Clark, and got massive explosion in worth. there's no sociopathy involved from him back then.
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.
"Better to just not think about it" feels like the majority sentiment and a lot of people's path to their own (albeit less) success. We’ve got lots of modern phrases like "don’t listen to the haters" or "you do you" or things like imposter syndrome to support it.
I'm not sure they really feel significant guilt.
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.
I think it is more that some people just can’t do introspection, it might even be that they don’t have inner monologue.
Yes. One of the most important things to learn is how to introspect and actually FEEL the pain that surfaces when you do. That's how healing begins. If you never do that, you're stuck in whatever destructive patterns you use to avoid that introspection forever.
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 also think it is important to learn to feel and to separate the feeling from the acting on the feelings. In my mind this is what distinguishes an adult from a child. Sadly, I know many adults who have never learned this lesson (including members of my own family), so it's probably not a very good legal definition, although I like it as a practical one.
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.
I've taken the position that anything the ultra-wealthy say is likely wrong, and every decision they take will negatively affect society, unless and until its corroborated by an unbiased source with expertise in the subject matter.
I think the ultra-wealthy are just operating under what they think they need to tell people in order to get the outcomes they want. You're only going to hear the truth - or something correct - if its to their benefit.
I used to think this but I think that's only true for the low-profile wealthy folks. And they voice their opinion indirectly, like through owning media companies.
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.
Yes, deciding to be famous AFTER becoming rich is a choice, and arguably not optimally intelligent.
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.
This is an SNL skit from 1996 that has always been my framing for how many-million/billionaires think, Tiny Camels through Giant Needles: https://www.reddit.com/r/RebelChristianity/comments/113xslu/...
The inflection on his voice…
The ultra-wealthy are no different from anyone else. However the effects of their decisions - both good and bad - tend to be much larger than what most of us can do.
Yes, they are different: People who care about others are less likely to become ultra rich. You become ultra rich by mostly caring about your cut and your profits.
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.
I invite you to expand on your blanket statement. I posit that the ultra-wealthy are necessarily and unavoidably transformed by the lived experience of having that level of wealth: virtually any logistical inconvenience you and I currently relate to can be monied away; the proportion of strangers and near-strangers that want to interact with you deferentially and transactionally jumps; the consequences for many of your mistakes become invisible to you.
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.
I agree that the consequences are greater. There seem to be at least two perspectives on whether wealth makes you different:
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.
I think the Hemingway line could read two ways. He could be saying there is no difference save for having money. Or, he could be implying money is corrupting and would lead to the same observed behaviors no matter who gets rich.
The nature of the ultra wealthy is obviously no different than the rest of us - but the nurture and environment they live is in extremely different. That they live so isolated from the broader human community, are so disconnected from routine discomforts, and so shielded from any kind of consequences is an obvious difference from the rest of us. It’s no wonder they develop sociopathic tendencies when they are materially rewarded for such behavior and have no empathy for the way the rest of us must live.
>The ultra-wealthy are no different from anyone else
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).
I really like the way you put it: “It’s okay to be wrong. We’re all wrong from time to time. What’s not okay is not having a way to be corrected by the outside world for a specific reason: being at the top of the political pyramid, being ultra-wealthy and surrounded by flattery, etc"
You're right, but we've never devised any system that prevents this from happening. Every single organization leads to a concentration of wealth and power. And even those ideally conceived to have counterbalancing forces, eventually are corrupted and subverted. It seems to be the steady state of reality.
This will be the reality until we come up with a way to make good decisions using direct democracy, and make that decision-making process so fast and easy that it can be used for any kind of group decision.
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.
There does not seem to be an easy answer for which political system delivers the best benefits.
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
That's just a naive utopian fantasy.
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.
All of reality clumps no? Any grouping tends to attract more grouping, because the force that created the group increases as its groups more. Be it wealth, power, or sheer mass.
This feels like a rule of the universe, from plants and solar systems to wealth portfolios.
Only catastrophic events break it up.
Maybe wealth should be reset every time? There shouldn't be inheritence at all?
It's a lovely idea, but that system will have to be enforced by a power structure... which will always tend to grant itself special privileges. And even before such corruption, without inherited wealth, there will still be entrenched institutions that control resources, and have a continuity of leadership, that will always be looking out for themselves and their in-group. It's just natural.
Define wealth in an exact manner.
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.
I think you have put this in a correct, concise manner which I agree with entirely.
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.
You're correcting him by commenting on a popular article arguing he's wrong. So it appears he has been "corrected" rather broadly and vocally
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/
You are completely misconstruing his argument. It has nothing to do with lack of introspection.
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.
It's not just war. Take infant deaths. Absolutely devastating today, but a large percent of people went through that in the past. They even re-used the names of their dead children.
To put it another way, the problem is not what this idiot is saying on some podcast, the problem is that people are listening to it. For example, in the case of this blogger, listening and then taking the time to publish a web page about what was said, hoping to make money from readers
We now live in a courtier world where flattery and politics determine successful outcomes.
That has been the case for a vast swathe of time across history. It hurts because we had a nice couple of decades where it seemed that, not only was this not the case, but that we were directionally accelerating away from it.
Yes we do. We always did, and we still do.
Immense wealth or power should be difficult to hold on to. Until our policymakers understand that we'll have to occasionally resort to the Luigi method.
Not just elevated them, but effectively given them a free pass for anything they do.
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.
> it’s that we have elevated the wealthy into a status where they can be wrong, have no correction,
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.
Yes. I mean calling them out and people take personal offense as if they are receiving handouts from them or they are that rich. They don't give a damn about anyone or anything for that matter
Tech still broadly respects edgy, hot take contrarianism, even if they think Andreessen is stupid in this instance.
YUP
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.
and what do you think his punishment should be?
Having to pay taxes?
Enough of this consequence-free bullshit is what gets you a French Revolution, and that's good for no one.
We've entered the "Emperor has no Clothes; but if I just prend he does, I'll be elevated higher than anyone who says otherwise" or "Lets all try to keep ourselves out of the permanent underclass"
I have not elevated this person, and very much despise much of what he does and says. For the record.
The penultimate sentence of this fantastic 1997 interview with Trump has stayed with me since I read it: "Trump, who had aspired to and achieved the ultimate luxury, an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul."
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1997/05/19/trump-solo
He likes to molest the money though (cf @hasanabi)
He likes to molest/rape underage girls. If he just molested money that wouldn't be that much of a problem.
His enacting of tariffs could be considered "molesting money", and that is affecting practically everyone in the world right now.
Marc "Invest in Crypto" Andreessen can't afford self-reflection? Color me surprised.
Not just crypto in the "ride the lightning that is bitcoin" but NFTs. FFS, that takes some serious lack of introspection as to assign any value to those things other than laundering money and duping the public.
And lots of wealthy people like hanging out at Davos giving policymakers bad ideas…
They should be forced to stay at a Holiday Inn Express and meet at a Detroit Denny's to discuss the future of the world. Maybe get some perspective in the process!
A salient comment on the current times. But I'll extend it beyond just wealthy people. We have given every soul a platform. At first glance, that seems like a good thing. But we've given everyone a platform where they can accumulate large followings and express a great many opinions completely unchallenged. In reality, we've built force multiplier tools that enable the dissemination of all takes, good and bad, at a rather alarming rate. And, I would argue, the average joe is a bit gullible and easy to indoctrinate. Society, largely speaking, does not receive enough education and protections against these types of indoctrination platforms that we've made. That celebrities, ultra wealthy individuals, bad actors, and random dumbasses can all use and abuse to sell some physical or cognitive junk.
Is this a difference in kind versus say the printing press and books? That technology gave some souls a platform.
Then and now, having a platform isn't the same as having an effective and popular platform for force indoctrination...
I think it's the velocity by which you can disseminate that makes it different and more dangerous.
It’s really heartening to see that “eat the rich” is finally becoming a consistent message on HN
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
Americans are weird creatures in this regard. Give them 5% of their compensation / 0.0001% of a company in stock/options and suddenly they think they have become Big Capital.
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.
John Steinbeck: “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires”
Roughly 18% of US households have a net worth over 1 million, so to some extent, they really are.
It's a big number, but it's often tied up in housing in VHCOL/HCOL areas. It also doesn't mean much re: not needing to work in these areas.
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.
truer words have yet to be spoken
I don't think technologists are blue collar. They are not necessarily part of the owner class but true blue collar work is not done behind desks.
These terms are all pretty flexible - blue collar in 1950 is extremely different than blue collar in 2026.
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
Software developers definitely do not have class solidarity and their anxiety is unjustified.
No question about that and that’s the whole point
people think that they’re gonna become an independently wealthy millionaire by boot licking their way into some kind of financial windfall
The difference is having your body worn out before you are at an age where you can retire.
Having your body worn out before you can retire assumes retirement as a concept exists, which it doesn’t in the US. “Retirement” aka living without working, as a blue collar worker, was a middle class fantasy that only existed for an extremely small minority of people from 1949-1985. Even the ones who had their bodies worn out dealt with years of asbestos poisoning black lung all these other externalities that corporations did not care about and so arguing about this concept of retirement is moot because it’s never really a real thing.
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
What does "eat the rich" actually mean besides a broad distaste of people who have more?
Consume their egregious wealth?
How would that work?
> Step one is that all of us blue collar technologists need to get organized
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.
Who builds and maintains the platforms?
Labor is entitled to all it creates.
Greedy, unprincipled sycophants?
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.
That’s correct and the percentage of those people seems to be going down
but hey maybe I’m totally wrong
and the number of synchophants and boot lickers who work in tech is going up
Organizing years ago would have been huge for software developers but unfortunately I do think it is too late now, given the onset of AI (weakens the collective by improving individual productivity since not every developer will be onboard) and just the current political landscape. The NLRB has been gutted.
> The NLRB has been gutted.
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.
this is so funny for me to read. a few years ago, i would see programmers saying they can negotiate better deals for themselves than a union could. now you're saying it's already over, programming as a skill has a future valuation that's heading to zero.
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.
Individuals can negotiate insane labors deals for themselves. Go ask the best-paid person you know how they got their pay package, it usually entails some form of schmoozing. Unions are for bringing the bottom-rung up to par, not for raising the top bar further.
> 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.
i'm saying test it, let's get scientific. why would you have a problem with that?
The fatalistic view that "platform holders have all the cards" and that "programming as a skill has a future valuation that's heading to zero" is a common psychological barrier in labor struggles. Oppressed or subordinate groups often suffer from a "diffuse, magical belief in the invulnerability and power of the oppressor"[0].
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
Well said!
I’m not here to argue with you
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
Of course you're not here to argue, there's no precedent for what you're suggesting. Nobody has fought against Apple, Google or Microsoft and taken home a significant victory.
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.
Your belief that "power structures can't be fixed" perfectly illustrates what educator Paulo Freire described as the oppressed having a "diffuse, magical belief in the invulnerability and power of the oppressor". Anthropologist David Graeber noted that modern capitalism has constructed a vast bureaucratic apparatus "designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures" and to ensure that challenging existing power arrangements seems like an "idle fantasy". The idea that the platform holder holds all the cards is an ideological tool used to encourage passivity and convince you that your only option is to submit.
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.
To quote the right honourable sire Elon of the Musk house: "True".
What we're seeing is the culmination of these three ideas:
1. Prosperity theology [1]. This idea took hold in early Protestantism. Even if you're not religious, it's had an undeniable impact on the West (including the so-called "Protestant work ethic"). The idea is that you are essentially blsssed by God if you are rich. This was a huge departure from Catholic dogma. If Jesus was real and came back in Texas today he'd get hung at a Communist terrorist;
2. The myth of meritocracy. This is a core tenet of capitalism that the wealthy are that way because they deserve to be; and
#. In the US in particular, hyper-individualism. Specifically, the destruction of any kinf of collectivism. This shields people from the impacts of their actions and any kind of accountability.
People who find success tend to get high on their own supply and they have no one around them to correct their behavior. Instead they have a cadre of slavishly sycophantic yes men.
There's a common refrain that it takes three generations to go from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves. The vast majority of fortunes are lost, or at least significantly reduced, within 3 generations because the later generations get surrounded by the same yes men and have no idea what it takes to maintain let alone make a fortune. There's really no hope for any form of introspection, accountability or growth.
I'm old enough to remember the Netscape saga. I remember feeling kind of sorry for Marc Andressen who got kinda screwed by the whole netscape deal. By "screwed" I mean he ended up with ~$50M (IIRC) on a deal worth billions. I also remember how the other tech titans of the era were at least ostensibly anti-establishment rebels. "Tech hippies" in a way.
I really wonder what those people would think of the likes of Andressen, Musk, Bezos, Ballmer, Gates, Thiel, etc. All those are objectively awful people who kowtow to the American administration and have essentially just become military contractors who uphold awful ideas like "transhumanism" (which is just eugenics).
But is he wrong? Our company culture rewards psychopaths and sociopaths because they have no conscience. In a way, there's no accountability without a conscience. So it might be a successful strategy in business but it is objectively making the world a worse place. And that ultimately ends with heads on spikes.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology
They just gone through a cycle where their wealth collapsse to near zero by external forces outside of their control.
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 has no soul. Many people don't.
He went so far as believing that those that tried to describe the contemplative nature such as Freud and Jung were conspiring. Contemplative nature is a scam!
Yes, most people around you are hollow, completely. Another pill is, someone's face is the he exact model of their most recurrent thought. An ugly, disgusting, punchable face reveals and ugly and disgusting set of thoughts.
Now you can spot the soulless, you're cursed.
Marc Andreessen has been too wealthy for too long, and has lost perspective.
Billionaires are modern day monarchs, divorced from the experience of hoi polloi. I don’t say this (in this present moment) out of simple complaint or sloganeering, though both are easily applied. The argument I’m making is that gaining and/or living with sufficiently ludicrous wealth—orders of magnitude beyond what most of us plebs would retire on—leads _inextricably_ to living a life that is so utterly different that people lose completely the understanding of what the majority of the population actually does with their days. It almost doesn’t matter if the person who gains this level of wealth was “good” or “bad” or whatever qualifier you want to apply.
This isn’t a new or a fresh take. It’s a tale as old as…well, I’m comparing to monarchy. But it bears restating, because the folks that are empowered to make sweeping changes to the systems that we all live under cannot actually relate to what most of those changes feel like. This is less of an individual moral failing than a structural one—though when the structure is being driven by the selfsame individuals, I guess there’s plenty of blame to go around.
It isn’t so surprising that someone raised with generational wealth would have such blinders—and in fact I find that fairly forgivable on the individual basis, though damning of the system that allows that to happen while there’s still people unhoused and unfed.
Perhaps more surprising (and maybe serving as a warning to the rest of us) is that it’s visibly possible to have and to then lose that perspective and ability to relate. This is most visible with folks whose public work precedes their extreme wealth. Jerry Seinfeld still writes comedy—but it doesn’t hit like his earlier works, since there isn’t a shared reality. Our own Paul Graham’s earlier essays have aged, but a fair number of them still ring true; his more recent works barely make a blip here, and with reason.
Marc Andreessen might be right for himself. Or he might be dead wrong. But his advice and writings are effectively useless to the rest of us either way. There’s no shared “there” there.
It's nearly the same concept of move fast and break things... what happened to this forum.
400 years ago black people and women weren’t considered equal to white men.
So congratulations, you are a fool
congratulations
you are absolutely right, whilst having $0b in your accounts