Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection

seydor

Technologists used to be smart, now they just have money.

moomoo11

Imagine taking advice from VC instead of their money.

a456463

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

pier25

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.

Reddit_MLP2

Let me fix that for you. Marc Andreessen is wrong. There is the whole broken clock analogy though...

kendalf89

It's a shame, anyone who's dumb enough to believe Marc Andreessen, isn't going to be smart enough to read this article.

leetvibecoder

> 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

John23832

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.

kergonath

To be fair, Marc Andreessen is wrong about many things.

josefritzishere

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.

daveguy

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

willio58

> 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.

an0malous

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.

arthurjj

>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

general_reveal

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!”

delichon

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.

sibeliuss

His statements about this were purely politics, and nothing more. He himself does not believe this. It's political revisionism.

wodenokoto

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?

TrackerFF

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.

keiferski

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.