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alz Profile picture
@alz_zyd_
Jun 11, 2021 • 16 tweets • 4 min read • Read on X
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So I randomly got a text from an unknown number to join a whatsapp crypto trading group
The goal of the group seems to be to "analyze the BTC and ETH markets" jointly...? and make money?
I thought the group was about making money, but there is a bunch of weird talk about reincarnation
Reincarnation is apparently what you do when you lose money to make it back
Uh, DM me if you happen to want the whatsapp link. Hopefully sharing it won't prevent me from getting reincarnated
"My goodness, it's a loss. I can only use the reincarnation method to recover my funds." This is giving me poorly-written-videogame-NPC-speech vibes
I'm now trying to figure out whether I'm the only human in here. I asked "what is reincarnation" as a bait and got totally ignored
OK so they waited until I asked three times, before reaching out in a private message
Game's up, I think. Crypto is weird
(I just copypasted a pic from their chat group)
This is a hilariously elaborate scam though, all this fake activity/impression of people making tons of money. how do you even generate this many fake phone numbers and bot speech at scale
Alright, finally we have the "hey make an account on here give us your CC and we'll make you rich"
I think I figured it out. The big group chat stopped having any activity after a flurry of messages. It's just one guy with a manual bot and a script. Then they hook you in the private messages
So I figured out what the reincarnation method is. Utterly brilliant
(in case not entirely obvious I am trolling throughout this thread, do not actually join these groups, etc)

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More from @alz_zyd_

alz Profile picture
Sep 29
Frequent convo between me and PhD students

Me: "After 400 hours of data analysis on industry X, have you talked to anyone actually working in industry X"
Student (S): "No"
Me: "Why not?"
Student: "Where would I find someone in industry X willing to talk to me"
Me: "Have you tried asking your advisor to put you in touch with someone in industry X"
S: "No"
Me: "Have you tried finding the subreddit/forum/Twitter where these people hang out to at least hear them chattering about stuff"
S: "No"
Me: Have you tried cold-DM-ing people on linkedin in your industry, saying you're a researcher in their field at a top school, and you want to interview them
S: No, who would ever waste time talking to me??
Me: But have you ever tried
S: No
Me: What's the cost of trying
S: zero
Read 7 tweets
alz Profile picture
Sep 26
Heterodox economists believe that modern economics is flawed because it restricts itself to Newtonian mathematics. However, this reflects a flawed and outdated understanding of modern economics. Here are some examples of post-Newtonian mathematics used in modern economics
Rather than restricting to classic calculus-based approaches, or even simpler linear-system solutions, modern economics uses tropical geometry to analyze existence of equilibria in indivisible-goods economies Image
Mechanism design has moved well past its roots in Newtonian calculus-of-variations; modern approaches use the richer modern theory of optimal transport Image
Read 5 tweets
alz Profile picture
Aug 25
Nightclubs, luxury watches and handbags, and Labubu toys are social goods. People buy them because others buy them. Economic theory predicts that demand for social goods is fragile. In a revised paper, for the first time ever, we've found empirical evidence of this fragility!
In this paper with @sammy_rosen and Sebeom Oh, we find a natural experiment "disrupting" initial NFT sales. Suppose a collection launches, and BTC prices happen to move a lot. The mint is less likely to succeed, because NFT buyers are distracted managing their crypto portfolios Image
@sammy_rosen "Disrupted" NFT collections never fully recover: they perform worse six months after the initial sale!

This suggests NFTs don't have a fixed fundamental value: their value is socially constructed and dependent on coordination
Read 6 tweets
alz Profile picture
Aug 20
I'm an academic economist and I've been bullish on crypto for a few years. The thesis is simple. Crypto is a tool almost exclusively for criminals: it's basically useless to anyone in the developed world. But it's a really good tool for criminals
Crypto does, however, link to a very fundamental question: finance, as we know it, is a derivative of legal systems. Finance is the trading of promises, and promises only work when people think they'll be enforced
Finance has historically lived in hubs like NYC, London, Hong Kong, because these places have the state capacity to enforce promises. Finance doesn't meaningfully happen in the developing world, largely because there isn't the state capacity to consistently enforce promises
Read 5 tweets
alz Profile picture
Aug 12
I feel like a substantial amount of creativity comes literally just from knowing a lot of stuff. If you know like, three paintings, history looks like a linear progression from painting 1 to 2 to 3. If you see like 3 million paintings, you have a richer understanding of history
You see not only the famous things, but also all the smaller ones not taken, that could have been famous, but somehow missed the bus, you draw connections that haven't been drawn, revive forgotten stuff, and so on
My basis for this is that (IMO) creativity among PhD students in our field is surprisingly predictable. The people with richer life experiences tend to be more creative. I don't think this is psychological, really. I think they just have more material to draw connections from
Read 5 tweets
alz Profile picture
Jun 2
Conjecture: econ academia is very far from the optimal architecture for data research. The optimal architecture is much more centralized. Half the researchers work together, or in large teams, to build clean and efficient datasets. The rest work in smaller teams to analyze data
All empirical research is based on data. In the current architecture, building and maintaining datasets is under-rewarded. Some of this work is done by government workers, who are generally (and increasingly perhaps) underpaid and under-appreciated
Some of it is done by private teams. But because ultimately findings are published and rewarded - not data - the incentive is to keep your data private, writing at least a few good papers with the data, before making it public
Read 6 tweets

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