co-posted with H&F?! I dunno, I wanted philosophy bc of Socrates and the Stoic connection but whatever... nobody runs that here.

Short little Sunday reminder that SV billionaires aren't sages to follow.

Our dear Marc Andreessen was on a Silicon Valley podcast this week.

Some Seneca-level musings:

• Great men didn't sit around introspecting
• Move forward. Go.
• I've found that people who dwell on the past get stuck in the past

He went on to claim that the very concept of the individual was only invented a few hundred years ago and that it wasn’t until the start of the 20th century that we started to believe in guilt and self-criticism.

perhaps Andreessen hadn’t heard Socrates’ dictum that “the unexamined life is not worth living”, or had misunderstood the entire philosophy of stoics like Marcus Aurelius whose thinking he often cites (he even claimed, as part of his defence, that the author of Meditations would have been on his side of this argument).

Jemima, taking him to tasks for his all-too-obvious flaws, admits that FINE OK:

overthinking and ruminating on things that are in the past or out of our control gets us nowhere, as the Stoics knew. [...] in our decadent age, in which most of us sit on our behinds all day rather than using our bodies for anything productive, there is a risk that we can become a little indulgent of our own emotional whims

...BUT:

Andreessen seems to conflate the idea of overthinking, and even of guilt, with introspection, a word deriving from Latin that simply means “looking within”. The value of introspection is not to keep us in our heads but rather to liberate us from them. It is to allow us to let go of our repetitive thoughts — our own mental doomscrolling, if you will — by the conscious process of working out why and how they got there in the first place.

I kind of appreciate this information consumption model (#1383936):

yeah, also, thanks commentariat for your AI-generated illustration

My main issue with Andreessen is not so much that he’s wrong; it’s that he’s so confident about it. He sounded similarly confident when he told us that bitcoin represented a breakthrough akin to the internet, that Web3 was the future and that we shouldn’t fear AI because “the moral of every story is the good guys win”.

yeah, nice try bitcoin. how silly.

BAD-ASS finish: "Silicon Valley billionaires are not our sages; they’re our enablers, keeping us distracted and dumb, and making sure we never stop scrolling for long enough to think about why we are wasting our lives on their platforms."BAD-ASS finish:
"Silicon Valley billionaires are not our sages; they’re our enablers, keeping us distracted and dumb, and making sure we never stop scrolling for long enough to think about why we are wasting our lives on their platforms."

archive: https://archive.md/VesJL