surprisetalkMarc Andreessen is wrong about introspection
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/marc-andreessen-is-wrong-about-introspection/
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
>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).
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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’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.
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.
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.
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...
> 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.
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 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.
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?
that's pretty rich coming from Tim "They're paying me enough to ignore slavery" Dillon.
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.