Alex Wittenberg

With depressed patients, Dr. Espinola said, “their speech is generally more monotone, flatter and softer. They also have a reduced pitch range and lower volume. They take more pauses. They stop more often.”

Protocol treasuries need to be structured with an infinite time horizon. This requires thinking effectively about:

Some of the most important objectives we have been evaluating are portability, scale, and trust. Portability allows people to keep their social life intact even if they switch providers. Scale allows people to participate in global discourse. And trust is created by giving people insight into what services are doing with their data and how... See more

Why, exactly, are we rendered so uncomfortable by concentrating on things that matter—the things we thought we wanted to do with our lives—that we’d rather flee into distractions, which, by definition, are what we don’t want to be doing with our lives? Certain specific tasks might be so unpleasant or intimidating that a preference for avoiding them... See more

Believing that everything will be better if only we gather more information commits us to endless searching and casting about, to one more swipe of the screen in the hope that the elusive bit of data, which will make everything clear, will suddenly present itself. From one angle, this is just another symptom of reducing our experience of the world... See more

So much for the fat protocol thesis, we might say. The platforms of web3 start to look a lot like the p2p platforms of web2 and web1: the Pipes, the Airbnbs, the Ebays that win markets by capturing liquidity for rare, non-fungible items and services, their strong liquidity moat giving them strong commissions.

The rate of innovation is increasing and will continue to do so even without any machine able to design its successor. Some might call this phenomenon an intelligence explosion, but I think it’s more accurate to call it a technological explosion that includes cognitive technologies along with physical ones. Computer hardware and software are the... See more

Throughout our work, we’ve encountered four main areas of opportunities:

The trucks are rolling panopticons.