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ModernMech: It’s funny that everyone is coming around to understanding the rich elite are mostly socio- and psychopaths. People who were clued into them early were told they were rude for calling them out but now the they are just admitting it straight up.I’m sorry to say it but Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg, Sama, and Bezos are clearly on that spectrum. And no, it’s not autism it’s sociopathy — they view us as NPCs and call empathy a weakness and a scam. And if you think this is rude to say, I don’t because the palpable lack of empathy at the highest echelons of power (from POTUS down) is becoming a real liability for humanity as a whole given the amount of power they have amassed.
SmirkingRevenge: Don't forget Lawnmower Ellison
pbiggar: As I recall, Andreesen's descent started with his being publicly criticized during the cancel culture movement of the mid 2010s. This seems to relate to that - perhaps the criticism came so hard he couldn't take it, and his solution was to refuse to think about it.
Psillisp: "Examine yourselves as to whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Do you not know yourselves..."~2 Corinthians 13:5~ Freud
_doctor_love: Two Corinthians, that's the ball game right there!
krona: > If you go back, like, 400 years ago, it never would have occurred to anybody to be introspectiveDunno, Shakespeare died 410 years ago and soliloquies on internal moral dilemmas and emotional states in Macbeth, Othello and Hamlet are a cornerstone of those plays.
mc32: Isn’t introspection a necessary ingredient to form morals?
Lammy: Paywall: https://web.archive.org/web/20260324230642/https://www.thena...> and a man with an impossibly large headI think Andreessen sucks, but I think body-shaming him is lame too, especially in the opening sentence (yes I read the whole article and agree with it to the point that I have nothing to say about the rest)
reedf1: And homer and the entire corpus of greek plays.
PaulHoule: I think Marvin Minsky was the first person that I saw take a stand against "knowing yourself" Minsky himself struggled with Freud, wanted to reject Freud, yet found he couldn't do so entirely. With a little more insight than Andreesen he traced "pathological self-knowing" to Eastern roots including meditation practice.What everybody gets wrong about Andreesen is that Andreesen's origin story of being radicalized through business falls flat: his business partner is the son of notorious conservative pugilist David Horowitzhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Horowitzand I find it impossible to believe that he didn't get a big dose of ideology from that source.
ap99: David Horowitz doesn't seem radical at all. His positions as far as I can google in five minutes seem very reasonable.I think you seeing him as radical is more a reflection of how radically left you are.
tolciho: > I think Marvin Minsky was the first person that I saw take a stand against "knowing yourself" Ordinarily M. de Villefort made and returned very few visits. His wife visited for him, and this was the received thing in the world, where the weighty and multifarious occupations of the magistrate were accepted as an excuse for what was really only calculated pride, a manifestation of professed superiority—in fact, the application of the axiom, _Pretend to think well of yourself, and the world will think well of you_, an axiom a hundred times more useful in society nowadays than that of the Greeks, “Know thyself,” a knowledge for which, in our days, we have substituted the less difficult and more advantageous science of _knowing others_. "The Count of Monte Cristo". Alexandre Dumas. 1846.
smitty1e: > notorious conservative pugilist David Horowitz"From 1956 to 1975, Horowitz was an outspoken adherent of the New Left. He later rejected progressive ideas and became a defender of neoconservatism. Horowitz recounted his ideological journey in a series of retrospective books, culminating with his 1996 memoir Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey."https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Horowitz
api: The New Left / Marxist to neocon or hard right pipeline is a thing. A bunch of the Bush-era neocons were former Marxists. There's a few notable present-day neoreactionaries and other hard-right types that were former Marxists.Backing up a bit, I've long observed that a decent number of highly educated and intelligent folks tend to gravitate toward authoritarian politics. That's because, being smart and educated, they obviously know how everything should work and can centrally plan society with their superior intellect. Obviously.Marxism/Leninism delivers that. So does hard-right nationalism and neoreactionary ideology. It's not a big jump. Basically it's a jump you make when you're either tired of losing (Marxism is not popular in the West) or you abandon nominal egalitarianism.I said nominal egalitarianism because all authoritarian systems and political ideologies are inherently elitist. Marxism/Leninism is "we know what's good for you" elitism while neoreaction and hard-right nationalism is "we don't care about you" elitism.I think this is the real basis of the "horseshoe theory." The horseshoe meets at the extremes because the extremes are authoritarian and they have that in common.
deaux: > Backing up a bit, I've long observed that a decent number of highly educated and intelligent folks tend to gravitate toward authoritarian politics. That's because, being smart and educated, they obviously know how everything should work.Intelligent yet unwise (otherwise known as stupid) people are the most dangerous combination. The opposite, "wise yet dumb" on the other hand, tend to be fine.For this reason I'm not a fan of the word "intelligent" as it's so meaningless on its own, yet it instantly evokes positive associations.
api: Oh yeah. I've said for years: smart dumb is much worse than dumb dumb.Dumb dumb is just dumb and ineffective. Smart dumb can do real damage.
api: To be fair, when you paired callout culture (a better name than cancel culture) with the toxic herd dynamics of Twitter as a platform (IMO Twitter has always been toxic), the result could be very brutal and unfair.Someone decides you committed a faux pas, and people pile on, and this gets attention, which means the algorithm pushes it, and pushes the most inflammatory discourse around it. This creates a feedback loop that pushes things to maximum toxicity because, well, this keeps people on the app and seeing ads.It worked with the nascent new right and Gamergate, and it worked for "woke" callout culture. The algorithm doesn't care about the angle. It just "likes" toxicity because it drives engagement.Algorithmic social media is a disease.The best thing to do when targeted by such things is tell them to fuck off and close the browser or delete the app. If you engage, this drives the algorithmic feedback cycle. But all these guys are social media (esp Twitter) addicts.
adolph: The video [0] that has a transcript provides a little more context.A. Andreessen, I'd bet, enjoys a degree of controversy and nothing gets people activated so much as "being wrong on the Internet." [1]B. In context, Andreessen's critique of "introspection" has to do with a particular variety, "I've just I found people who dwell in the past get stuck in the past. It's it's just it's a real problem and it's it's a problem at work and it's a problem at home." Probably a better term for Andreessen to use is "rumination." But, given A., that would be less controversial.C. More broadly, there is some criticism of how "know thyself" is interpreted today and perhaps in TFA, which is less than developed. In the Meaning Crisis lecture series Vervaeke [2] notes: That's not what "Know thyself" means. It doesn't mean that kind of stroking of your autobiographical ego. Know thyself is much more a kind of direct participatory knowing. It means understanding how you operate. It's not - if I were to use a literary analogy - it's not like your autobiography, it's more like your owner's manual. D. Criticism of Andreessen seems to have the generic perspective of public health in mind rather than the perspective of "I'm happy that works for you." Consider for a moment how hard it is for a person to realize that the minds of other people are drastically different from one's own, such as having an "inner monologue" or not [3] and how “Introspection reveals that one is frequently conscious of some form of inner speech, which may appear either in a condensed or expanded form.” [4] The inner experience of Andreessen may be very different from that of his critics.0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBVe3M2g_SA1. https://xkcd.com/386/2. https://www.meaningcrisis.co/episode-4-socrates-and-the-ques...3. https://ryanandrewlangdon.wordpress.com/2020/01/28/today-i-l...4. https://hurlburt.faculty.unlv.edu/hurlburt-heavey-2018.pdf
deaux: I can tell you that even on HN, most people have still not come around to it. If in a thread about Ellisson or Thiel or their respective companies you point out that Bezos, Zuck and Sama - and as a result the companies they lead and the use of their capital - are in the exact same spot on the sociopathy spectrum, this immediately invites hordes of downvotes by the (ex-)FAANG HNers who can't come to terms with the fact their whole net worth is based on growing the power of just as despicable of leaders as the ones they're busy chastising.
reedf1: I've always been a bit embarrassed by the extent of my self-conciousness, but recently I'm starting to think of it as more of a virtue than a hindrance.
gtowey: Virtue is something the virtueless prey upon. However, the takeaway is not to abandon virtue, it's to censure the virtueless. There are far more of us than there are of them.
energy123: The most dangerous people throughout history take morality very seriously. They have so much commitment to their moral system that they're willing to kill millions of people to enforce it.People like Andreessen are not without morality. Their moral system is right-libertarianism.The people I am least afraid of are those who are without a deep fixation on morality.
SmirkingRevenge: I think there's a Goldilocks zone of moral flexibility and openness somewhere in between complete moral rigidness and total amorality, I think.The zone of moral rigidness contains all those species of fundamentalism that have caused so much conflict and atrocity. It's one one of the very bad zones.But another very bad zone is the total amorality of psychopaths and narcissists (and they often pretend to be in the other zones), and they are also responsible for so much destruction an atrocity.
