March 17, 2026
Were great men of history introspective? Join me in a dual purpose post in which I test how tweets show up on my website, and wonder if there is something to this discussion over on X today. Marc Andreessen, the famous venture capitalist who co-built the 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 I'm assuming was his point. Anyway, let's see if the tweet embed works first:
Does the embed work? I made a similar point just the other day in my post "Meditation is Narcissism" in which I repeat a Taleb quote saying meditation is narcissism without hurting someone. I'll mention a meta point that everyone mad over at X is missing:
Everyone has an innate model of the world. Whether they realize it or not, they have a model of the world. I find it funny when sometimes people blame me for discussing theories and ideas, because the underlying assumption is that only I am running on a model, mathematical or otherwise, while the other person lives in actual reality. Whereas what's really happening is that I am simply interested in discussing my models of the world via ideas and their criticisms, and possibly improving them if I can. What's further true is that someone uninterested in discussing ideas and their criticisms is either unaware of their models, or uninterested in their criticisms. Uninterested in betterment and progression? Can't be me.
What's happening with Marc's and Taleb's point is that people are not considering their meta-models as part of the stated ideas (meditation being narcissism or introspection being bad). The main idea to pay attention to here is discreteness, or what I'll call asymmetric moderation. As in, deep introspection (and meditation) is, at least in western culture, a relatively new part of one's operating model, but an even more modern take is that it is not something that is a) continous, or b) inifinitely valuable. So what is being pointed to is not that an absence of introspection and meditation is good, but that these activities are best kept curbed and moderated. If one's model of the world includes discreteness and asymmetry, where things are innately curved and curbed, Marc's comments can be accepted without causing a mental blue screen of death.
One meta-model I heard about while attending Wolfram Summer School in 2024 was the "Ising Model". It is an example that changes the way one incorporates ideas, or reacts to them. But anyway, let's test how Wikipedia articles look on my website.
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