Market Design/Entrepreneurship Professor @HarvardHBS & Faculty Affiliate @Harvard Economics; Research @a16zcrypto; Editor @restatjournal; Econ @Quora; … | #QED
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Mar 22 • 24 tweets • 5 min read
Misinformation is on a massive rise, and social media platforms are scrambling to figure out what to do about it.
In @TheAtlantic today, my @Harvard colleague Jesse Shapiro and I offer a surprising answer: 👇👀
Platforms should give up.
𝑊ℎ𝑎𝑡!?, you're thinking – but before you throw tomatoes 🍅 or quote-Xweet this post to dunk on it, read on. 🧵👇
May 12, 2023 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
Using percentage-of-deaths-in-region as a metric for thinking about a preventable illness is absurd even leaving aside all of the risks from "mild" Covid cases.
Suppose drunk driving deaths doubled. According to @CDCgov, that means we should care less about preventing Covid!?
If you want you can think of the issue via analogy at the extrema:
Suppose all death categories went up by a factor of 1000. Identical percentages. But would we have the same level of concern as we do today?
Of course not! We'd be trying to stop ourselves from going extinct!!
Dec 18, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Apropos of nothing in particular, I've been thinking about my advisor Al Roth's keen observation that "rules that shouldn't need to be rules" are often a sign of market failure.... 👇
... For example, before it switched to a centralized algorithm, the US medical residency match apparently used to have a rule that in effect said that offers could only be made during the official offer period. 👇
Sep 25, 2022 • 18 tweets • 5 min read
Shanah tova, QED! May your 5783 be a prime year in as many ways as possible!
(5783 is prime, and is also a concatenation of three primes. And that's not all..!)
🧵👇
The last prime that was a concatenation of 5, 7, and a prime was four years ago (5779). The next one is five decamillennia away (57107). Even the next prime year ending in "83" isn't for over a millennium – it's 6883!
Aug 22, 2022 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
Don't get me wrong -- I'm VERY glad we've improved access to Paxlovid!
But posting increased treatment counts isn't the win that @WhiteHouse apparently thinks it is.
What we want to do is reduce transmission, so the number of people needing to get treatment would go *down*.
Imagine this trend extrapolated out to the limit. Do you think the @WhiteHouse would be proudly reporting "329 million people received Paxlovid this month"?
That would mean nearly the entire American population had gotten covid within the month!!
If NFTs are all about enabling ownership, then why would creators choose to give away intellectual property rights through creative commons licensing (cc0)? 🤔❓❔❓
🧵👇
"Open-sourcing" IP opens it up to experimentation and recombination – which can sometimes grow its value! a16zcrypto.com/cc0-nft-creati…
Jun 10, 2022 • 26 tweets • 13 min read
1/ Here’s a (seeming) paradox: If digital space is infinitely expansible, then how can there be scarcity? And how should builders and users think about the value of digital land and other spaces in the metaverse? 🧵👇
2/ In an @a16z crypto article last week, I argued that the old IRL mantra of “location location location” also applies in the context of web3 platforms, where individuals can uniquely own scarce locations for private or shared use. a16zcrypto.com/metaverse-real…
May 21, 2022 • 13 tweets • 5 min read
In our @HarvardBiz article last week, @Jad_AE and I discussed not only the value web3 provides [
], but also how it may (and may not) change business strategy.
(thread 👇)
Today's dominant internet platforms are built on aggregating users (and their data!) to harness network effects – a key source of competitive advantage. [hbr.org/2019/01/why-so…]
The "web3 way" – building open platforms that directly share value with users – can create more value for everyone, including the platforms(!).
How so?
Thread 🧵👇
(1) The ability to plug into open content networks and integrate pre-existing digital assets can help new platforms resolve the classic "cold-start problem" – and expand existing platforms' surface reach and content potential. hbr.org/2022/05/why-bu…
Nov 27, 2021 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
See this headline? It's from October 2020.
Sound eerily similar to what's going on right now, a year later? Yep.
I really wish the US had worked harder to fight the virus, both at home and abroad 🙁
Quick follow-up note because I've already gotten a query:
To me, "fighting the virus" means not just producing vaccines (which we didn't do enough of!) but also engaging in the outreach necessary to distribute them and convince people to take them (worldwide!)...
Nov 10, 2021 • 59 tweets • 33 min read
Thrilled to have a piece with @NFTbark in @HarvardBiz today explaining why we think NFTs are real and here to stay.
The imperial measurement system may on its way back – and @bopinion#Conundrums has put together a fun #puzzle to help you get ready: bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
The challenge is simple: We've given a series of measurement conversion problems; your goal is to identify the resulting units, indicated by blanks. (Many are imperial units — although not all of them are! A few are rather obscure.) bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
In this series, he uses on-chain randomization to take classic art back in time – it's "as if a hundred-year-old dried painting is reversed to the liquid state"
Happy new year! Interesting numerical properties of 2021: a thread👇
2021 = 4347 is semi-prime, meaning it's the product of two primes – and that's not all: it's a product of "cousin primes" that differ by only 4. The last such year was 1517, and the next is 4757.
Dec 30, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
If you're stuck on our @bopinion Home Alone #Conundrum, don't despair! We're filling in some of the harder clues as hints:
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