[ahnick]

This blog post and all the comments in response feel very tautological. I think Marc has a fairly simple point here, which is don't spend time dwelling on the past. Learn from the past, take away information about how things can be improved, but then make a plan (for whatever it is that you are building/doing) and move forward with that plan.

In the podcast, he basically lays out that the A16Z thesis is that there is not enough technology, information, and intelligence in the world, so they are going out and investing in companies/ideas that can make an impact in these areas. That requires learning from the past, but not dwelling on it. Seems like a very sensible and positive approach to me.

[jdelman]

That’s simply not what introspection is, though.

[ahnick]

Introspection is the conscious examination of one’s own mental, emotional, and cognitive processes to improve self-awareness. I think Marc's critique here is a lot of what can be learned about past mistakes is outside of an individual's own failings.

I was recently reading a post about how the Claude Code leak and Boris Cherny had the following to say..

"Mistakes happen. As a team, the important thing is to recognize it’s never an individuals’s fault — it’s the process, the culture, or the infra.

In this case, there was a manual deploy step that should have been better automated. Our team has made a few improvements to the automation for next time, a couple more on the way."

When complex systems fail often there is more than one thing that went wrong. Uncovering what those things are is important, so that you can address them and prevent them from happening again. Once fixed, it is on to the next task and no need to dwell on the past.

[GeoAtreides]

introspection and rumination are two different things

[simianwords]

You are right, a simpler way to frame it is: Marc is not anti introspection but post introspection in that there's something beyond introspection. The author seems to have made an uncharitable take for easy virality.

[poly2it]

Why does he need to make a historical justification for it then? It would be disingenuous if, as the blog author suggests, Andreessen knows better.

[ahnick]

People have been doing self-examination for a long time, but Freud's use of psychoanalysis is a fairly modern phenomenon and it's benefits are dubious. Modern therapy looks increasingly like pseudoscience. I expect biotech/AI advancements to make much of modern therapy irrelevant over time, as we obtain fine-grained control over the actual processes in the brain causing various afflictions.

[turtlesdown11]

modern therapy has nothing to with Freud, modern therapy approaches are empirically tested, and show efficacy comparable to medication, but sure other than that whole modern scientific approach... its definitely just pseudoscience

the only pseudoscience you mentioned is the idea that mental "afflictions" are entirely biological

[ahnick]

For sure Freud and modern therapy as practiced today are very different. Freud influenced the language, structure, and goals of talk therapy more than the exact methods most therapists use now. Modern therapy kept many of his clinical observations about inner conflict and relationships, but dropped or revised a lot of his more speculative theory.

Since mental illness or other trauma is entirely contained to the brain, you can in fact say that the problem is entirely biological. We are starting to see the tech industry make real inroads to biology. Neuralink, gene therapies, AI designed drugs, etc. All of these innovations will decrease the need for therapy, which at best you can say helps people learn to live with conditions, but never permanently fixes the problem.

[slopinthebag]

> empirically tested

Doesn't really matter when most of the results are unreproducible.