Marc Andreessen on culture, media & elites
Andreessen defines elites by who can get whom fired, and argues that falling trust in institutions since the 1970s is earned, not a trick of social media. He sees today's moral fervor as secularized religion, a recurring Puritan awakening, and warns that every era wrongly thinks it has morality figured out, that new ideas always start as heresies, and that once censorship begins it never stops. Media has always been partisan scandal sheets, so he reads either live posts or old books. He also describes the unspoken Silicon Valley deal that tech founders would give back through philanthropy.
15 points · 6 appearances · 2023–2026
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2023–2026 · changed view
“So the main thesis on the essay is that what we're dealing with here is intelligence, and it's really important to kind of talk about the sort of very nature of what intelligence is. And fortunately we have a predecessor to machine intelligence, which is human intelligence, and we've got, you know, observations and theories over thousands of years for what intelligence is in the hands of humans. And what intelligence is, right, I mean what it literally is, is the way to, you know, capture, process, analyze, synthesize information, solve problems. But the observation of intelligence in human hands is that intelligence quite literally makes everything better. And what I mean by that is every kind of outcome of like human quality of life, whether it's education outcomes or success of your children or career success or health or lifetime satisfaction, by the way, propensity to peacefulness as opposed to violence, propensity for open-mindedness versus bigotry, those are all associated with higher levels of intelligence. Smarter people have better outcomes than almost as you, right, in almost every domain of activity.”
2023–2026
“So look, the only way civilization gets moved forward is when people like this do something new. Because civilization as a whole does not do new things. Groups of people do not do new things. These things don't happen automatically. By default nothing changes. The only way civilizational change on any of these axes ever happens is because one of these people stands up and says, no, I'm going to do something different than what everybody else has ever done before. So, this is progress, like, this is actually how it happens. Sometimes they get lionized or awarded. Sometimes they get crucified. Sometimes the crucifixion is literal. Sometimes it's just symbolic. But they are those kinds of people, and then martyrs when they go down in flames and again, this is where it really screws the people's moral judgments because everybody wants to have the sort of super clear story of like, okay, he did a bad thing and he was punished. And I'm like, no, he was the kind of person who was going to do great things and also was going to take on a level of risk and take on a level of sort of extreme behavior such that he was going to expose himself to flying too close to the sun, wings melt and crash to ground. But it's a package deal. The reason you have the Picasso's and the Beethovens and all these people is because they're willing to take these extreme level of risks. They are that creative and original, not just in their art or their business, but in everything else that they do that they will set themselves up to be able to fail psychologically.”
2023–2026
“So one is very high in what's called trait openness, which is one of the Big Five, which is basically just like, flat out open to new ideas. And of course, the nature of trait openness is trait openness means you're not just open to new ideas in one category, you're open to many different kinds of new ideas. And so we might talk about the fact that a lot of innovators also are very creative people in other aspects of their lives, even outside of their specific creative domain. So that's important. But of course, just being open is not sufficient, because if you're just open, you could just be curious and explore and spend your entire life reading and doing, talking to people and never actually create something. So you also need a couple of other things. You need a high level of conscientiousness, which is another one of the Big Five. You need somebody who's really willing to apply themselves, and in our world, typically over a period of many years to be able to accomplish something great. They typically work very hard. That often gets obscured because the stories that end up getting told about these people are, it's just like this kid, and he just had this idea, and it was like a stroke of genius. And it was like a moment in time and was just like, oh, he was so lucky. And it's like, no, for most of these people, it's years and years and years of applied effort. And so you need somebody with an extreme, basically, willingness to defer gratification and really apply themselves to a specific thing for a long time. And of course, this is why there aren't very many of these people, there aren't many people who are high in openness and high in conscientiousness because to a certain extent, they're opposed traits. And so you need somebody who has both of those. Third is you need somebody high in disagreeableness, which is the third of the Big Five. So you need somebody who's just basically ornery, because if they're not ornery, then they'll be talked out of their ideas by people who will be like, oh, well, because the reaction, most people have new ideas is, oh, that's dumb. And so somebody who's too agreeable will be easily dissuaded to not pursue, not pulling the thread anymore. So you need somebody highly disagreeable.”
2014–2025 · changed view
“Software is a technology that, it's like a, you know, the concept of the philosopher stone. The philosopher stone in alchemy transmutes lead into gold, and Newton spent 20 years trying to find the philosopher stone, never got there, nobody's ever figured it out. Software is our modern philosopher stone, and in economic terms it transmutes labor into capital, which is like a super interesting thing.”