Stefan Cohen

@shiraeis this all tracks

ok so my theory that ashkenazi judaism was an unintentional eugenics program for a trait cluster that overlaps heavily with autism and adhd but isn't exactly either clinically: talmudic scholarship is different from normal scholarship. it's recursive pattern extraction across massive corpora, exception-finding, holding contradictory interpretations in working memory while searching for reconciliation, basically what we'd now call hypersystemizing. gematria (assigning numerical values to letters and finding "meaningful" correspondences) is literally recreational combinatorics with religious characteristics and for ~40 generations (~800-1600 CE), the marriage market explicitly rewarded this. the shidduch system matched talmudic prodigies with wealthy families' daughters. functionally, it's assortative mating for systematizing ability with direct reproductive consequences. meanwhile occupational restrictions pushed ashkenazi jews into finance, trade, medicine, which are all high cognitive load niches where the same traits would be advantageous the cognitive profile this produced is wild and lopsided. verbal IQ highest of any group, mathematical also highest of any group, but spatial ability decidedly not. that's a specific phenotype being selected hard the result: 0.2% of world population, 22% of all nobel laureates (110x base rate), ~30% of fields medals, 41% of economics nobels but here's where it gets interesting. i don't think this selected for "intelligence" as a clean construct. i think it selected for a trait cluster that overlaps heavily with what we now diagnose as autism and adhd, a cluster including intense pattern recognition, ability to hyperfocus on abstract domains, and reduced sensitivity to social consensus when it conflicts with logical consistency the genetics support this. the TBCB gene mutation linked to autism has a carrier frequency of 1:80 in ashkenazi jews vs 5:100,000 in the general population. in israeli studies, jewish children's ASD referral rates are 6x higher than bedouin-arab rates, and high-functioning autism specifically is dramatically more prevalent (29.6% vs 2.6%) baron-cohen's hyper-systemizing theory of autism finds that parents who score high on systematizing are more likely to produce autistic children, which is literally what the shidduch system was optimizing for across a millennium of closed gene flow it's probably not selecting for autism or adhd as clinical entities. it's more that the underlying trait distribution got shifted. the same alleles that in certain combinations produce clinical autism/adhd, in other combinations produce the kid who argues with the rabbi for six hours about a single line of talmud and then grows up to win a fields medal personally, i come from a lineage of rabbis dating back to 1400s lithuania so i'm basically a heritage breed at this point lmao

signing up for erebor, pretty refreshing a bank that uses passkeys

As AI continues to commoditize software, venture returns will go from bits to atoms - and vc as an asset class will experience an inverse, going back to what it was invented for post World War ll: technically hard, capital intensive, and important ideas solving humanity’s fundamental problems. That decade gave us Intel which designed silicon chips, Genentech which pioneered gene editing, and Sun Microsystems which laid the ground work for the modern internet. I believe we are marching towards what will become the most critical time of technology inflection, where the future will look at today with awe, just like how we admired the heydays of the Roman Empire.

capex intensity, regulated industries, physical world and network effect businesses benefit from automation and have durability in the current technology paradigm

I enjoy this point in the market where the death of a critical technology is being pronounced by nyt all while every major bank, fintech and brokerage are launching their own tokenized products on public blockchains

The secret sauce is interoperability. We’ve built a platform with two sides: On one side, licensed issuers (like MoonPay) connect to on-chain infrastructure where they mint and burn stablecoins, distribute rewards, and move those stablecoins. On the other side, brands design their own custom stablecoins - all built on a shared technology standard. M0 is shared infrastructure bringing stablecoin builders and issuers together. W/@reginatto @EthereumDenver @moonpay

Introducing PYUSDx. A new offering from M0, @MoonPay and @PayPal that lets teams launch custom stablecoins backed by PayPal USD.

unsurprising that the occ is banning yield on stablecoins (for now) their mission is to preserve banks and stablecoins threaten banks. we are going back to offshore innovation for now w/ stables

as internet+finance consumption shifts from human -> agent, tokenization is the process of making finance agent consumable. it is like the etf race on steroids. agents don't care whose brand of financial product they are buying, they just care about performance.

Truth

this is really cool. very excited about open messaging for humans and agents

@sreeramkannan @madhavanmalolan @alexblania @worldnetwork App attestations can solve for this on the iPhone. Unless you have a robot typing on the soft Apple keyboard

Proof of human is “bound” to your iPhone encrypted under Face ID with the iCloud backup. So any app can know someone’s using it from the phone you registered with. But of course the app can’t know the human is using it. This kind of auth works well enough for some usecases 1) matchmaking where knowing this person authorized their agent is good enough 2) Sybil resistance - assigning free compute credits etc Cc @lay2000lbs and @dcbuilder

Great stuff! @alexblania @worldcoin - genuine question: how would a proof of human work if i prove myself as human, but the entity really tweeting from my account is openclaw? is that a human generated content, or bot created content? how do we tell? will we be able to tell? do we need to be able to tell?

out of necessity, the internet will soon be made up of geofenced, human-verified, invite-only micro-communities

I have always hated the web3 word? But in the context of ai it is the right framing of where we are going. Web3 is actually the agentic web on crypto rails

@MacroMate8 lol

tempo is tron for white people

Most founders have no idea where they lose investors in their pitch @tylerjrichards and I built a tool that tells you in 60 seconds: 1. Paste your granola investor transcript 2. See where to get stronger 3. Get a list of VCs/angels who will get it vcwhisper.com

folks will have individualized agents as their wealth advisor. agents will be a much more rationale purchaser of life insurance (protection, tax planning, etc will overcome “thinking” of death)—those agents will want digital money (stables, BTC); building this now at @meanwhile

I’d back @alexblania in anything he works on. This is a great profile on his reality-bending work at @worldnetwork and @merge.

all of my high agency friends are addicted to claude code / codex and up until 2am building shit every night. some combination of the dopamine hit and productivity rush makes it very addictive

we need human only spaces on the internet