[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)