March 21, 2026 ·
Up next on the introspection discourse, I heard Marc Andreessen talk about IBM on a podcast from the other day as a prime example of large-scale businesses. He mentions how in big corporations, each layer of communication upwards is polished to make the local team look good, but a slight spin on truth between ten or twelve layers ends up detached from reality by the time word gets to the CEO. In reverse, he compares large company CEOs to kings of nations surrounded by truth-blocking courtiers, where checking in on a team up close is akin to a state visit. It reminded me of this Silicon Valley scene:
In a discussion over email, now-philosopher Mahmoud Rasmi told me about then-philosopher Friedrich Schelling, who argued that we are opaque to ourselves; that there is a conscious part of the brain we can actively engage with, and an unconscious part that remains unseen and unobservable. Seperately, David Hume has some unified self vs. bundle of selves thing going I learnt. I'll link Mahmoud's post explaining it better below, but what I got from it was that the game of Chinese whispers isn't solely happening in large businesses like IBM, it's also happening within our internal communications; just at a single-person scale perhaps. So what is one to make of this fractal-sounding commonality?
Quantum computationalist David Deutsch often argues that science explains the seen in terms of the unseen. I really like this framing and have gained much appreciation for it over time. Maybe I'm overreaching, but I think Schelling is talking about a similar idea in an internal-experience way; that we have seen and unseen parts of our consciousness, and while we are able to directly interact with the seen, we must trust that an unseen part exists; and act in ways to better understand them both. An example: NASA credits Pythagoras as the first person to propose a spherical Earth. His explanation was philosophical and aesthetic; that a sphere is the perfect, harmonious, symmetrical shape. He was explaining the seen in terms of something he couldn't see. Aristotle in his book On the Heavens around 350 BCE extended this idea: the shadow of Earth on the Moon in Lunar eclipses was always circular, ships would disappear over the horizon, and so on; further explanations of the seen via the unseen.
A more complex example may be the different paths Newton and Leibniz took to developing calculus. Newton's infamous falling apple is empirical in nature, while Leibniz had an algebraic, symbolic-reasoning-based approach to his method. This of course is not to rob Newton of abstract reasoning (though who's kidding who, he lost over £20,000 in the South Sea Bubble; what a noob), or to say that Leibniz wasn't empirical enough, but to say that it, too, supports Schelling's conscious/unconscious and Deutsch's seen/unseen thesis. Calculus describes trajectories, arches, curves, etc. we can see in terms of ideas we cannot.
Going back to IBM, Marc's praise for Elon Musk is that he has a high preference for ground truth. This is a roundabout equivalent to his introspection claim, that communication over several layers of spin ends up distorted; whether for large corporations or one's internal experiences. Leaving corporations and entering markets, this distortion cascade is very observable in how investors react to information. Investment advice is always a stone's throw away on social media, but how many layers of communication away is it from truth?
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