[HN Gopher] Interview with Marc Andreessen on Learning to Love t...
___________________________________________________________________
Interview with Marc Andreessen on Learning to Love the Humanities,
and RSS
Author : jseliger
Score : 59 points
Date : 2022-06-15 19:25 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (conversationswithtyler.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (conversationswithtyler.com)
| willsher wrote:
| Humanities - history, geography, politics, religion and partially
| are economics, are our legacy; what we are and therefore what we
| can become. They are arts not sciences. Oral and written
| tradition for generations before technology & science. Of course
| this is important to humans, and as a species we should embrace
| it. Computers should augment us, not replace is.
| farnsworth wrote:
| These topics are incredibly important, and yet it's extremely
| difficult to make a living studying them, and people are
| routinely mocked for attempting to do so. One day we will
| realize that an entire society made up of engineers and
| managers is not a healthy one. How can we fix this when "stuff
| that people will pay for" is pretty much the only meaningful
| measure of value?
| borroka wrote:
| He is a smart person, but not as brilliant as I thought he was
| (and I am not getting this impression just from this interview, I
| have been following him for a long time).
|
| And the same is true for many other VC types, who, if it were not
| for the fact that founders and companies need their money, would
| have the same intellectual and "lived-life" weight of your run-
| of-the-mills 9-to-5 office worker.
|
| He speaks way too fast which gives the impression is "throwing
| up" words instead of making a point. Chill. It is an interview,
| not a slam poetry the-quickest-wins contest.
|
| He is asked how to identify talent and after working in VC for
| 15-20 years he gives a made-up answer on the spot. I don't think
| he is guarding some secrets, it appears he has not developed a
| theory. Which is fine, or the theory is implicit, he is looking
| for "vibes" more than "hard" traits after all the necessary boxes
| are checked (smart, persistent, able to articulate thoughts).
| Hard to disagree. If there were a secret, it'd be out there
| already found. But the made-up answer was not impressive at all
| (a videotape of when they were kids? Come on).
|
| He talks about web3 and he comes up with ways of monetizing, say,
| podcasts with proposals that you would expect from a teenager. At
| the end, he basically admits he has no clue and the future will
| take care of itself.
|
| He has watched many movies, but he doesn't have a favorite one.
|
| He seems unfazed by selection biases. Peter Thiel is a great at
| recognizing talent, he says. How many would be recognize with
| 1/1000th of his money and how many he did not recognize?
|
| He repeats "insights" and "talking points" gotten from twitter,
| social media, the usual playgrounds that myself, a total nobody,
| could repeat with more flavor.
|
| He had a few interesting insights (saying they were "brilliant"
| would be quite arrogant on my part), surely. Not enough to be
| considered "brilliant".
| CalChris wrote:
| It's hard to take A16Z seriously after they opened a crypto
| fund and invested in Adam Neumann.
| mellosouls wrote:
| Great interview. Nice to read a tech leader with more cultural
| hinterland and intellectual diversity than the normal
| marketing/coding/mountain biking dreariness.
| smohare wrote:
| titanomachy wrote:
| It is actually kind of interesting to me that he grew up
| somewhere where it was unusual to have a passport or leave
| the state for college. It's not a perspective I'm very well-
| acquainted with.
| tomcam wrote:
| Is that the way you would like your own posts responded to?
| xcambar wrote:
| I'm confused.
|
| When MA talks about "humanities", I feeel like he is only
| describing "behaviorism" and "behavior psychology", which would
| be, at the very least, intellectually misleading.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| Honestly, I'm not entirely sure what _humanities_ stands for in
| the US (or UK, AUS, SA, ...) education context, if it has even
| a fixed meaning over time. Like the (Humbold-esque?)
| categorization of _Naturwisschenschaften_ vs
| _Geisteswissenschaften_ in my country /language, it seems to be
| partly used for dissing the humanities, but _Reine
| Wissenschaften_ (where you 're getting a degree in philosophy
| when studying maths) seems absent?
|
| I found it telling when the interview was touching Florence and
| The Medici, that renaissance humanism (with its all-important
| aspect of rediscovering, republishing, and preserving antique
| text material) wasn't connected to the humanities topic. Maybe
| it was more of a Venice thing, but I saw it as a lost
| opportunity to learn more of Andreessen's opinion on
| preservation of our digital heritage (or lack thereof) seeing
| as he developed Netscape from Mosaic etc.
| jfengel wrote:
| The terminology is vaguely defined. In the mouth of a techie,
| I'd assume they mean "everything that gets studied but isn't
| STEM or business", with a connotation "and is therefore easy
| since it doesn't have a rigorous grading system".
|
| There are links between Renaissance humanism and what is now
| called "humanities". The Humanists weren't just about the re-
| naissance of Greek and Roman works, but also about creating
| new ones. A lot of humanists were poets, painters, and
| writers -- fields often lumped in with "humanities". There
| was also a rebirth of what the Greeks called philosophy,
| which also included subjects that we'd call sociology (laws,
| ethics, forms of government, etc.) Sociology is also treated
| as adjacent to humanities.
|
| Techies do need to learn that the easily-measurable aspects
| of a technology are not the only important ones. We use tech
| because it appeals to us as humans, using the yardstick of
| our perceptions of things. Humanities are easily dissed
| because they're hard to measure objectively, but that doesn't
| mean they're unimportant. Indeed, they may be more important
| precisely because we haven't (yet) learned them well enough
| to be simple.
| HillRat wrote:
| The fact that Andreessen is becoming a humanities autodidact
| through Burnham (the later arch-conservative Burnham, rather
| than the Marxist Burnham, I assume) is ... well, it's an
| interesting choice, I suppose. About the only thing that's
| stood the test of time as anything more than a curiosity is
| "The Managerial Revolution," but as socioeconomic analysis
| Chandler did it later, and better; and as geopolitical theory
| Mahan did it first, and better. I have a hunch he's going back
| to "Suicide of the West" and its bloody-minded anti-liberalism
| (in the "western liberal democracies" sense of "liberal") which
| Carl Schmidt did first, and better (using that word advisedly).
| All in all, it's an idiosyncratic self-education that's mired
| in a very specific far-right midcentury worldview.
| soSadm4n wrote:
| Marc rides on the coattails of better thinkers and engineers
| who came before and had less to build on. At this point he's
| a contemporary American elite grifter who relies on the small
| government meme despite being of a generation that benefited
| from a social safety net.
|
| Seeing Gen X tech leaders as great thinkers when they're
| riding the wave of the world rebuilding after WW2 is so
| bizarre to me; none of Marc's work is fundamental to anything
| these days. Thousands of others understand these systems at
| the same level.
|
| It's a LARP, it's propaganda. It's taking intentional
| advantage of quirks in lizard brain biology. He's smart but
| he's not owed fawning deference. I just can't under people
| with deferential behavior towards people like him anymore.
|
| Not that you putting it out there like that. Just saying; to
| keep it's all a rise and fall of biology. The spiraling
| rambling they put on is a show for people who don't know
| better.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Marc grew up in the rural Midwest during Reagan's 1980s.
| Not sure what you mean that he's some great beneficiary of
| direct social welfare.
| danans wrote:
| In what way did growing up in the rural Midwest in the
| 80s mean Andreesen didn't benefit from social welfare?
|
| Public schools and universities like his alma mater UIUC
| are a pretty clear example of social welfare heavily
| subsidized by taxpayers, especially in the 80s when you
| could attend an elite public university for a very low
| price, and have little to no student debt.
|
| Food stamps and SSI aren't the only forms of public
| assistance.
| MrMan wrote:
| Word
| soSadm4n wrote:
| smm11 wrote:
| I guess you just had to be there when we'd hold our breath for
| Netscape nightlies.
| unicornmama wrote:
| Great fluff piece for the ponzi and fraud GOAT.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Who is?
| kyoob wrote:
| Good on Tyler for pressing on the advantages of Web 3.0 for
| artists. I didn't really find MA's answers satisfactory.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| There are few actual good use cases for NFTs in ways that
| actually matter, buuuut... even in the case that a highly
| talented but unknown artist hits it big one day, there's
| nothing that is going to prevent the current owner from selling
| the art without going back to the NFT to compensate the artist.
| That's a pipe dream outside of the purely digital space.
| 121789 wrote:
| Why do people always use art as an example? Couldn't you do
| it with something like cars (where the car doesn't start
| until you prove you have the NFT)? I'm completely unfamiliar
| the with the space
| pavlov wrote:
| Would the NFT-locked car require a live blockchain
| connection and refuse to open its doors if it hasn't been
| able to sync its node after a certain time? So you'd get
| locked out of your car if mobile Internet goes down?
|
| If it doesn't do this, then you can steal the car by
| selling the NFT, simultaneously disabling the car's
| Internet connection, and driving off. Now the NFT is held
| by one person but the physical car is held by another.
| Jarwain wrote:
| Would likely require a form of NFT that's a little
| different and probably more complex than the current
| forn. Something about having the car key also be a
| cryptographic key, and transfers of the NFT invalidating
| keys or requiring rotation.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| What is it with NFTs and solving theoretical problems in
| extremely complex ways. Car thefts at at 1/3 of what they
| were in the 90s, and the existing mechanisms for
| buying/selling cars work just fine. Why do we need to
| introduce car DRM with brittle, distributed access
| control systems? You're more likely to get your tires or
| cat stolen - no NFT is going to prevent that.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-06-15 23:00 UTC)