Paul Jurjac

I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.

i'm going to offer a rebuttal to absolutely everything @pmarca has said about introspection here. and Marc, i say this respectfully, with peace and love. i would still love your support one day 😜 but this has to be said. <3 context: so, in a recent interview, Marc proudly declared he has "zero" introspection - "as little as possible" - and then made one of the most historically inaccurate claims i've ever heard a public intellectual say out loud: "if you go back 100 years ago, it never would have occurred to anybody to be introspective. all of the modern conceptions around introspection are manufactured in the 1910s, 1920s." he went further: "great men of history didn't sit around doing this stuff at any prior point. it's all a new construct." he blamed freud. he called it a "guilt-based whammy" from vienna designed to make individuals second-guess themselves. he said the best founders operate at "0% neuroticism" - no self-examination, no looking back. just forward. just go. right... except theres a huge problem with this: virtually every great mind in recorded human history disagrees with him. lets take this part case by case- socrates (469–399 BC) said "the unexamined life is not worth living" — and was executed rather than stop examining it. that was 2,400 years before freud opened a practice in vienna. marcus aurelius (121–180 AD) - roman emperor, the most powerful man alive - kept a private journal of ruthless self-examination. night after night, entry after entry: where am i failing? what are my weaknesses? how do i govern my own reactions before i govern rome? that journal became the meditations, one of the most influential texts in western civilization. marc says "great men of history didn't sit around doing this stuff." marcus aurelius literally ran the roman empire while doing exactly this. seneca (4 BC–65 AD) described his nightly introspective practice: "when the light has been removed and my wife has fallen silent, i examine my entire day and go back over what i've done and said, hiding nothing from myself and passing nothing by." that's therapy without a therapist. two thousand years before anyone in vienna was born. augustine of hippo (354–430 AD) wrote the confessions - 13 books of pure introspection examining his desires, his motivations, the nature of memory itself. it's considered the first autobiography in western literature. 1,500 years before freud. the buddha (5th century BC) built an entire system of practice around it. vipassanā literally means "clear seeing" - seeing into your own mind. the entire buddhist tradition is introspection formalized into a path of liberation. confucius (551–479 BC): "i daily examine myself on three points." self-examination was a prerequisite for ethical governance in chinese philosophy, not a weakness. lao tzu: "knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom." the upanishads (800–200 BC) made self-knowledge - ātman - the central pursuit of human existence. montaigne (1533–1592) literally invented the essay as a literary form - and the entire point of it was self-examination. the word "essay" comes from essayer: to try, to test. he was testing himself on paper. four centuries before freud. benjamin franklin created a systematic daily self-examination practice, tracking 13 virtues on a grid and reviewing his own behavior every single night. he wrote about it extensively in his autobiography. leonardo da vinci filled thousands of pages of private notebooks with constant self-questioning, to-do lists for self-improvement, and reflections on his own thinking process. thomas jefferson - whom marc literally name-drops in this same interview as a "founder-type" - kept meticulous journals, wrote extensively about his own contradictions, and advised: "when angry, count to ten before you speak. if very angry, count to a hundred." that's emotional self-regulation through introspection. alexander the great - also name-dropped by marc — slept with a copy of homer's iliad annotated by aristotle under his pillow. he was consumed with measuring himself against mythological heroes. that's introspection filtered through narrative identity. every major civilization on earth - greek, roman, indian, chinese, japanese, islamic - independently arrived at the same conclusion: the examined inner life is the highest form of human development. not a weakness. not a disease. the pinnacle. Marc's claim isn't just wrong. it's the kind of wrong that like requires never having read a single primary source from before 1900. that kind of wrong. theres another layer to this that kinda makes all of this even more mind boggling to me - even his own peers, the founders he holds up as exemplars, practice exactly what he dismisses... steve jobs did extensive zen meditation for decades. he credited it with sharpening his intuition and decision-making. he traveled to india specifically seeking inner knowledge. he once said his time meditating was the most important thing he ever did. elon musk has spoken repeatedly about examining his own first-principles thinking - the process of questioning your own assumptions down to bedrock. that is introspection. it's directed inward at your own reasoning patterns. mark zuckerberg did year-long personal challenges - reading a book every two weeks, learning mandarin, running every day, meeting someone new every day - each one designed as structured self-improvement through self-examination. you can't design a personal challenge without first looking inward at what needs to change. ray dalio built an entire management philosophy - principles - around radical self-awareness. he literally calls it "the most important thing." jeff bezos has talked about his "regret minimization framework" - a deeply introspective thought exercise where you project yourself to age 80 and look back at your decisions. that's introspection operating across a lifetime. you see what i mean? these are marc's people...his world. and they all do the thing he says nobody needs to do. okay now *this* is the part that really matters here (to me, at least): what Marc is actually describing when he says "introspection" isn't introspection at all. it's rumination. and those are **opposites*. rumination is dwelling on the past. spiraling. getting stuck in loops of regret and self-criticism. it's correlated with depression and paralysis. rumination is genuinely counterproductive. it is all the things Marc describes introspection being. introspection is self-awareness. its pattern recognition applied to your own mind. understanding your motivations, your biases, your blind spots. it iss correlated with better decision-making, stronger leadership, and longer-lasting impact. Marc has confused the disease with the medicine - and built an entire philosophy around avoiding the cure because he thinks it's the illness. the deepest irony: the claim that introspection is useless requires zero introspection to make. like...he didn't examine it. he didn't check it against history. he didn't question his own assumption or anything. he just said it, it felt right, and he kept going. then doubled down bc thats what supports the claim that he doesnt introspect. he even almost catches himself in the interview: "to actually analyze that properly would require a level of therapy that i'm not willing to engage in." he knows there's something under there. he just doesn't want to look, i guess? and that's fine as a personal choice. but don't dress it up as history. don't claim that socrates, marcus aurelius, the buddha, confucius, augustine, leonardo, franklin, jefferson, and every contemplative tradition in human civilization were all doing something that was "invented" by sigmund freud in 1920, man...like wtf. that's not a bold take, imho, it's just not having done the reading. (yes, claude did help me write this. no, that doesnt mean its any less sincere.)

Marcus Aurelius wrote an entire book about his feelings. It's called Meditations. It built more empires than venture capital ever will..