March 17, 2026 ·
Were great men of history introspective? Join me in a dual purpose post where I test how tweets show up on this website and wonder if there's something to this morning's viral discussion on X. Marc Andreessen, now-famous venture capitalist who co-built once-famous Mosaic and Netscape internet browsers, said on a podcast that introspection is hippie-dippie postmodernist BS. I'm paraphrasing here, but he claimed he's not much of an introspector and nor were the great men of history. It brings inaction was his point I'm assuming. Too long, didn't listen type beat. Anyway, let's see if the tweet embed works.
Did it work? I made a post on a similar topic just the other day, Meditation is Narcissism, in which I reference a Taleb quote saying meditation is narcissism without hurting others. Drawing on both instances, I'll mention a meta-point that folks mad over at X are missing. One version of what I'm about to describe is Stephen Wolfram's "Observer Theory", in which one must account for the observer's model of the world as part of their observations. In today's case, the observers are Marc and Taleb. Their statements cannot be fully made sense of without also incorporating the world-model they are running as observers.
Everyone runs a model of the world. Whether they realize it or not, they run a model of the world inside their head. If they are yet to inspect it, chances are it's the same world-model everyone else around them is running. I find it funny when people sometimes blame me for discussing too many theories and ideas, because the underlying assumption is that I'm the only one running a world-model, while the other person is living in actual reality. But what's really happening is I'm simply interested in outwardly discussing my world-model and seeking criticisms of it to possibly improve it. What's also true is that someone uninterested in discussing their world-model and seeking criticisms is either unaware of their model, or uninterested in improving it. Uninterested in betterment and progression? Can't be me.
What's happening with Marc and Taleb is that people angry at them aren't considering their world-models as part of their stated ideas. Two assumptions of their world-models hidden in plain sight are discreteness and non-linearity. Which is to say that they both believe introspection and meditation are a) not continuous, and b) not linear. Once one takes these assumptions into account and re-runs their statements as programs incorporating them, what's being said becomes clear. My read is that they don't mean the absence of introspection and meditation is good, but that these activities are best kept curbed and moderated. More generally, all (most?) modern physics-based-world-models now include discreteness and non-linearity as assumptions. So, if one's world-model includes discreteness and non-linearity as assumptions, where objects and ideas are innately curved and curbed, Marc's comments don't cause a mental blue-screen-of-death.
A general methodology takeaway here is that one can go around doing this to any and every older world-model. The hack is to inspect its essential assumptions, then find out what happens when one re-runs the program with a new set of assumptions. The "Lenz–Ising model" is an example of such a new-kind-of-world-model that changes the way one incorporates and reacts to ideas based on new assumptions. Anyway, let's see how Wikipedia links look.
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