Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection - Comments

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.

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.

> Technologists used to be smart

but were they, as a whole, ever wise?

Venture capitalists have never been smart and have always had money

He's not that old.

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!

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

We now live in a courtier world where flattery and politics determine successful outcomes.

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.

Marc "Invest in Crypto" Andreessen can't afford self-reflection? Color me surprised.

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

And lots of wealthy people like hanging out at Davos giving policymakers bad ideas…

To quote the right honourable sire Elon of the Musk house: "True".

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.

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

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"

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.

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.

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.

Tech still broadly respects edgy, hot take contrarianism, even if they think Andreessen is stupid in this instance.

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/

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.

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.

To put it another way, the problem is not what this idiot is saying on some popdcast, the problem is that people are listening to it. For example, in the case of this blogger, listeninngn and then taking the time to publish a web page about what was said, hoping to make money from readers

and what do you think his punishment should be?

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.

I have not elevated this person, and very much despise much of what he does and says. For the record.

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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.

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.

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 agree he could be doing political revisionism. But I fail to grasp, why?

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.

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.

They changed. You wouldn’t believe it but those most impacted by the mental rot that social media can induce - are the ultra wealthy.

They've just become hype-men for their own investments.

You realized they were always shitheels. Musk was a complete visible fraud long before 2016.

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 ).

> 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 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

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."

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.

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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.

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.

All the rich are on ketamine.

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.

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.

Thinking any one person is a 'thought leader' is, generally, a dumb thing to think.

You grew up.

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.

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.

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"

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 :)

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.

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.

> 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.

>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.

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.

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.

> 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 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.

I've worked with a couple people who got rich during dot-com era. They had the same "I'm right about everything" vibe.

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.

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.

That they'd become a platform as much as operating systems are.

So not only is he not wrong, he's a keen social critic?

That’s simply not what introspection is, though.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

> Technologists used to be smart

but were they, as a whole, ever wise?

Venture capitalists have never been smart and have always had money

He's not that old.

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!

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

We now live in a courtier world where flattery and politics determine successful outcomes.

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.

Marc "Invest in Crypto" Andreessen can't afford self-reflection? Color me surprised.

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

And lots of wealthy people like hanging out at Davos giving policymakers bad ideas…

To quote the right honourable sire Elon of the Musk house: "True".

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.

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

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"

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.

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.

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.

Tech still broadly respects edgy, hot take contrarianism, even if they think Andreessen is stupid in this instance.

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/

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.

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.

To put it another way, the problem is not what this idiot is saying on some popdcast, the problem is that people are listening to it. For example, in the case of this blogger, listeninngn and then taking the time to publish a web page about what was said, hoping to make money from readers

and what do you think his punishment should be?

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.

I have not elevated this person, and very much despise much of what he does and says. For the record.

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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.

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.

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 agree he could be doing political revisionism. But I fail to grasp, why?

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.

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.

They changed. You wouldn’t believe it but those most impacted by the mental rot that social media can induce - are the ultra wealthy.

They've just become hype-men for their own investments.

You realized they were always shitheels. Musk was a complete visible fraud long before 2016.

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 ).

> 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 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

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."

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.

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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.

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.

All the rich are on ketamine.

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.

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.

Thinking any one person is a 'thought leader' is, generally, a dumb thing to think.

You grew up.

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.

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.

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"

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 :)

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.

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.

> 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.

>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.

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.

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.

> 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 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.

I've worked with a couple people who got rich during dot-com era. They had the same "I'm right about everything" vibe.

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.

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.

That they'd become a platform as much as operating systems are.

So not only is he not wrong, he's a keen social critic?

That’s simply not what introspection is, though.

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.

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).

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.