The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 16 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Duke: Working independently yields better feedback than group discussions
“Nominal groups, which are groups of individuals working alone, tend to do better in terms of eliciting the, Feedback and opinions or even brainstorming than when people actually discuss things as a group.”
Duke: Decision outcomes depend solely on luck and information quality
“There's only two things that tell you how a decision is going to work out. One is luck. Can't do anything about it. The other is, is what's the information that went into the decision”
Duke: Investors prioritize risk calculation over expected value
“I think the biggest misconception about risk is that, this is going to be kind of weird, is people spend a lot of time trying to calculate their risk, but they don't think enough about whether they actually... Have the expected value, right? Like, are they win…”
Duke: Parallel portfolio bets reduce the penalty of individual inaccuracy
“Like if you can do a lot of bets in parallel, then the penalty for being less accurate on any single one of them is lower.”
Duke: 1990s poker required less skill due to wider informational edge
“So the gap between the people who like understood the game and knew the game and everybody else was so wide that as a professional, you didn't need to be nearly as good then as you would need to be now in order to win.”
Duke: De-risk major life decisions by treating them as non-permanent
“I don't think about most decisions that I make as permanent. So that's a way to de-risk, right? Like, if you know, well, I'll see how this goes, and if it doesn't work out, then I can go do something else”
Duke: Most decisions assumed to be irreversible are actually reversible
“A lot of decisions that we think are irreversible are actually reversible.”
Duke: Move fast when decision reversal costs are low
“If the cost to change our mind is low, then you should just kind of move fast, because it's actually a really good way to build information and actually build those good models, right, is just to interact with the world.”
Duke: Rating component parts before overall categories reduces decision bias
“When you break it down into component parts, and you rate those component parts first, before you rate the broader category, that this actually helps to discipline bias and noise”
Duke: About 80% of meeting time is spent discussing existing consensus
“About 80% of meetings get spent on agreements.”
Duke: Sunk cost fallacy is the dark side of grit
“Grit is such a great topic, and, you know, sticking to things that are hard and not getting kind of stuck in local minima is a really, really important feature of people who are successful. But the question is, like, you know, there's a dark side to grit, righ…”
Duke: Perform a pre-mortem immediately after making an investment
“As soon as you make an investment, you need to do premortem, and you need to say, what are the ways that this investment can go wrong?”
Duke: Investors should track lost deals identically to won deals
“Right, if you win a deal or you don't win a deal, it's the same thing, because you wanted to win the deal, so you should treat those companies identically.”
Duke: Investors must take exploratory meetings on high-failure deals
“You always have to have some exploratory lines open, right? You have to say, I'm specifically going to take some meetings, like I'm going to do some deck reviews, I'm going to take some meetings with people that I think are going to be really bad because that'…”
Duke: My stock portfolio is indexed and angel deals follow leads
“My stock portfolio is indexed because there's people who spend every single day trading in that market, and I hardly think that I'm smarter than them. And I think that's true of venture as well. So I have done angel investing, but it's always a long So I'm rea…”