Mike Janzen

Crypto Investing

[Mike Janzen @mikejanzen]

@LynAldenContact Anyone have this chart for Canada?

[Mike Janzen @mikejanzen]

@badccvoid @sama Applications will be analyzed by machine.

[Mike Janzen @mikejanzen]

This explains a lot. A quote from the referenced Chicago Unbound paper "Under the right conditions, however, many or most of the society's members, potentially even all, will end up with essentially identical beliefs, which may well be fanciful. "

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

Availability Cascades Run The World

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and hence clamorous to be led to safety -- by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” -- H.L. Mencken

Let’s start my new blog with the most important idea and paper I’ve encountered in the last 20 years. The idea is “availability cascades”; the paper is here: https://t.co/LsZWyB1Akk ; the authors are Timur Kuran and Cass Sunstein.

What’s an “availability cascade”? It’s a combination of:

“Availability” — short for “availability heuristic or availability bias, a pervasive mental shortcut whereby the perceived likelihood of any given event is tied to the ease with which its occurrence can be brought to mind”.

“Cascade” — short for “social cascades through which expressed perceptions trigger chains of individual responses that make these perceptions appear increasingly plausible through their rising availability in public discourse”.

An availability cascade is what happens when a social cascade rips through a population based on a more or less arbitrary topic — whatever topic happens to be in front of people when the cascade starts.

This framework immediately answers three nagging questions that a lot of people experience in daily life — “why are people worked up about THIS topic?”, and “why are SO MANY people worked up?”, combining into “why are SO MANY people worked up about THIS topic?”

Why THIS topic? The topic happened to be (literally) available; it happened to be in front of people at the start of a cascade.

Why SO MANY people? It’s a cascade; people copy each other; they want to sound smart and with it and don’t want to feel left behind. “Have you heard?”

Why SO MANY people and THIS topic? It’s an availability cascade; they’re in it, and so are you.

Now, this is not to say the topic isn’t IMPORTANT — just that whether it’s important is secondary to whether it was AVAILABLE. Many important topics never trigger cascades; many unimportant topics do trigger cascades. Crucially, you cannot judge the importance of a topic by the presence, or size, or absence, of a cascade. The topic’s main purpose is as a Schelling point for generating and holding social cohesion; actual importance is secondary or even completely unnecessary.

Kuran and Sunstein then define the other critical component of the idea of availability cascades: “availability entrepreneurs”.

Availability entrepreneurs are “social agents who understand the dynamics of availability cascades and seek to exploit their insights. Located anywhere in the social system, including the government, the media, nonprofit organizations, the business sector, and even households, these entrepreneurs attempt to trigger availability cascades likely to advance their own agendas. They do so by fixing people's attention on specific problems, interpreting phenomena in particular ways, and attempting to raise the salience of certain information.”

Availability entrepreneurs want to make their preferred topic AVAILABLE by highlighting it in a way likely to start a cascade, and then WIDESPREAD by fanning the flames of the cascade however they can.

As with any other area of entrepreneurship, the competition is stiff; most availability entrepreneurs fail to get their topic to trigger a cascade. But some do, and sometimes they really lucky and the resulting cascade really runs. Then you get a fad, a trend, a movement, a boom, a landslide election, or a revolution.

[Mike Janzen @mikejanzen]

@pickover This reads like a formal rendering of Anselm's ontological argument

[Mike Janzen @mikejanzen]

@paulg Yep. Double exponential derivation from Kurzweil 2005.

[Mike Janzen @mikejanzen]

@mishadavinci Great thread. Additionally, Web3 provides a trustless fabric letting AI agents communicate and cooperate (agree, act). Oracles help integrate the real world into this story (AI activity in world). Blockchain has memory letting AI agents establish a reputation.

[Mike Janzen @mikejanzen]

@MuskUniversity @elonmusk Also: throughput, self sovereignty, expression and enforcement of contract, provable automatic monetary policy, privacy

[Mike Janzen @mikejanzen]

@DocumentingBTC Free them

[Mike Janzen @mikejanzen]

@paoloardoino Human civilization is at 0:06. https://t.co/NQJGeQuFtM

[Mike Janzen @mikejanzen]

@ECampbell360 Putin may have sent in weaker soldiers so that their death/mistreatment at hands of Ukrainians would stir up hatred within the Russian people (making it easier to get them to go to war). This moral response disarms such a tactic.

[Mike Janzen @mikejanzen]

@moxie web3: fake it till you make it

[Mike Janzen @mikejanzen]

@dseemakurty @moxie He states a deeper problem (functionality > security): "Iterating quickly on centralized platforms is already outpacing the distributed protocols and consolidating control into platforms". Even deeper (perception > reality).

[Mike Janzen @mikejanzen]

@KashPrime @jasonhayes71 @SharkawyMD @ONgov Is there somewhere we can read more on this. All I can find is this chart showing extremely low impact of COVID on ICU beds on ON. https://t.co/GEn24urAWn

[Mike Janzen @mikejanzen]

@Neo_avax Can send to [email protected]

[Mike Janzen @mikejanzen]

@Neo_avax Hi - thanks for getting in touch. Please send info

[Mike Janzen @mikejanzen]

@Rainmaker1973 Flat moon propaganda

[Mike Janzen @mikejanzen]

@CryptoSeq I'm very interested in this. Are there any project updates? Is the code open source (where)? Thanks.

[Mike Janzen @mikejanzen]

@naval Quantum Mechanics works by superposition and reduction.

Understanding works by imagination and realization.

[Mike Janzen @mikejanzen]

@paul_d_andersen I’m overweight crypto only because of past growth. Your crypto sizing is sensible.

[Mike Janzen @mikejanzen]

@paul_d_andersen @APompliano My current asset allocation:
Crypto: 61%
Venture: 20%
Equity: 13.5%
Real Estate: 5%
Cash: 0.5%