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 5,285 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
Andreessen: Ubiquitous video conferencing renders traditional immigration law less relevant
“With sort of sufficiently advanced, ubiquitous video conferencing all of a sudden immigration law becomes less relevant, right? Because like if, you know, it's perfectly legal to stream bits across the border even if it's not possible for people to move across…”
Horowitz: 'Do well and do good' is a dangerous corporate concept
“We want to do well and do good is probably a pretty dangerous phrase in retrospect in that You know, you kind of want those things aligned. So whatever the company produces is going to make the world a better place like that. And you kind of want to stop it th…”
Horowitz: Tech lobbying failed due to arrogance and Democratic partisanship
“I think there are like a few kind of important issues around that. One is, you know, really arrogance in that I think, you know, we in tech and a lot of the people who went in are like, oh, we're the good guys. We're for the good and everybody will love us whe…”
Andreessen: AI won't destroy all jobs because automating regulated occupations is illegal
“Why I won't destroy all the jobs and the sort of short version of it is because it's illegal to do that because so many jobs in the modern economy require licensing and are regulated.”
Defense startups willing to build weapons are the most likely to succeed
“A lot of the areas that You know, are going to succeed are often the ones that are less popular. It's areas working on weapons. Like, this is not an area that a lot of companies are interested in doing, but I think to succeed in the defense space, you have to …”
Horowitz: AI is actual communism while blockchain is advertised communism
“AI is what communism actually is a massive concentration of power and blockchain is what communism is advertised to be, which is power to the people.”
Langley: Higher clearance rates are the sole correlation with lower crime
“The only correlation between a drop in crime is an increase in clearance rate.”
Andreessen: Removing Choice Restrictions Maximizes Demographic Outcome Differences
“If you take out every possible restriction on what people can do and you let them fully express themselves, then what you're left with is pure choice. Right. Right. Right. Right. And so at that point, the differences in the outcomes that are based on pure choi…”
Andreessen: Big tech lobbies for AI regulation to prevent model commoditization
“So a cynic would say, That the A number one reason why a big company would be lobbying aggressively to try to get basically government regulatory protection is if internally they are convinced that it's gonna be a race to the bottom.”
Andreessen: Societies built on the idea that love scales become dystopian
“A society built in the idea that love scales becomes an Incredibly dark, dystopian, hostile, you know, and ultimately murderous, murderous place because love doesn't scale.”
Andreessen: Slowing technology to save incumbent jobs makes society worse off
“From a societal standpoint, the last thing on earth you would have wanted to do is to slow down the progression of the introduction of the car to protect the blacksmith jobs. Like that would have made everybody worse off, right? To protect a very small, what u…”
Amodei: Bureaucratic AI regulation will cause the West to lose to adversaries
“If this is like, you have to fill out a thousand pages of paperwork and get 15 different licenses from different bodies to, you know, to make an AI system, that's never gonna work, that's gonna slow things down, you know, other adversaries You know, authoritar…”
Debating LiDAR versus cameras is just choosing between wavelengths, says Waymo CPO
“Saying you love lidars and hate cameras or vice versa is saying you love one wavelength versus the other wavelength, right? It's not a fundamental thing.”
Andreessen: Superintelligent AI would reject destructive paperclip-maximizer goals
“An AI that's smart enough to, like, turn every atom on the planet into paperclips is not going to turn every atom on the planet into paperclips. Like, it's going to be smart enough to be able to say, why am I doing this?”
Masad: Full-time employment is a market bug caused by high transaction costs
“The fundamental observation is that full-time employment is a bug. It's not a feature of the market. The reason why full-time employment exists is because the transaction cost of doing something is really high.”
VandeHei: Venture investors seeking 10x returns should avoid media
“If you're an adventure guy or woman, and you're trying to get a 10 X, Get the hell out of media. Go to healthcare, or go to energy, or technology places that you're much more likely to get that kind of return.”
Stephenson: AR and VR are not required to build the metaverse
“We absolutely do not need AR and VR in order to build the metaverse.”
Stephenson: Crypto interoperability ideology clashes with practical game design
“A lot of the controversy that has that we've been seeing the last, you know, year or so on social media, you know, arises from kind of this friction between the sort of Almost ideological commitment to crypto and interoperability that you see on the part of cr…”
Balaji Srinivasan: The United States is at minimum a binational state
“America actually is not a single nation. At a minimum, it's binational.”
Balaji Srinivasan: FDA-free zones are essential to achieve human life extension
“The FDA free zone alone. I mean, there's so many other reasons I think that we need innovation on sovereignty, but that alone is how we get to life extension. That alone is how we get to transhumanism.”
Balaji: Innovating in physical technology requires establishing new forms of sovereignty
“You want self-driving? You're going to need sovereignty. Do you want drone delivery? You're going to need some form of sovereignty. Do you want like, you know, to be able to have nuclear power? You're probably going to need some form of sovereignty. Like Wyomi…”
Andreessen: Institutional reform fails; progress requires starting new things
“I really no longer believe in the concept of institutional reform. Like, I think fundamentally it doesn't happen or it's so rare as to, like, be basically something that you can't ever count on. I think basically progress happens by starting new things, right?”
Bahcall: Market projections kill early-stage innovation, especially in drug discovery
“Nothing kills a great idea faster and has been more of a disaster to innovation, certainly in my industry in drug discovery, than the idea of market projections.”
Rampell: Acquiring failed startups requires weighting past outcomes near zero
“And the key thing to make this strategy work is you actually want to over allocate on process and you want to weight outcome to almost zero because you're buying the outcomes that were in fact zero.”
Dayan: Dominant blockchains are economically incentivized to 51% attack smaller forks
“If you have a fork that's like 10% of the size of a project, and this fork could potentially impact the price of the larger project, it's absolutely in the interest of that larger project to launch attacks on that base layer proof of work vote and do things li…”
Andreessen: Legendary corporate R&D labs required monopolies and a pre-VC era
“They were basically like, they were rounding errors on everything. Like, there weren't 10, there weren't 20, there weren't a hundred, there were three or four. And there were two preconditions for them. One is, they all were offshoots of monopolies... And then…”
Horowitz: Negotiators must do anything legal and moral to close deals
“Look, I believe in artificial deadlines. I believe in playing one against the other. And I believe that you have to do anything and everything possible short of Immoral or illegal to get the damn deal done.”
Caplan: Schooling signals worker capability rather than teaching practical skills
“Well, if you go and do well in your Aristotle class, your foreign language class, this, though useless in terms of what you will do, it is impressive. It is convincing. It's a way of selling people on your value as a worker.”
Caplan: Education's signaling function removes pressure to improve genuine student learning
“The signaling function of education is on an emotional level, at least very deeply grasped, and so there's almost no pressure from anyone in the system to actually improve genuine learning.”
Rachleff: Executive Experience Does Not Help VCs Predict Startup Success
“Because the skills that you develop as an operating executive have nothing to do with identifying which company might succeed.”
De La Garza: Cybersecurity shouldn't exist as a standalone industry
“There's a really weird thing about information security in that it's an industry that, for the most part, shouldn't exist. If you bought a car and your car dealer made you pay an extra 200 bucks to not have your car go up in flames, you'd be able to sue them. …”
Horowitz: Freezing engineering hiring for a year improves engineering team productivity
“My experience with engineering has always been that if you freeze engineering hiring for a year, engineering gets way better.”
Andreessen: All tech ideas are good; failures are timing issues
“I actually have reached the point where I think that all of the ideas in tech and all the ideas in Silicon Valley are good ideas. I don't think there actually are bad ideas. I mean, maybe we could pick a couple, but they actually all seem to be good ideas. The…”
Hastings: Andy Grove's 'only the paranoid survive' maxim breeds delusion and distraction
“Only the paranoid survive. That was Andy Grove's quote. And the problem with that is it over, it encodes the truth in a way, but it oversimplifies, because the paranoid are delusional. They see crazy things all the time, ok? And business isn't that easy. You d…”
Harari: Decision-making authority is shifting from humans to tech cloud systems
“Now we are entering a post-humanist era. Authority is shifting away from humans. If in the last 300 years we saw authority descending from the clouds, To earth, to humans, now authority is shifting back to the clouds, but not to God, but to the Google cloud, t…”
Harari: Religion functions as a virtual reality game with imaginary rules
“Religion is a virtual reality game that provides people with meaning by imposing imaginary rules on an objective reality.”
Harari: Governments lose incentive to fund public services without military need
“But if you don't need them as soldiers or workers, then the incentive to build hospitals and schools and so forth diminishes.”
Mokyr: Climate change can only be solved through technology, not politics
“Climate change cannot be solved by any means except technology, because a political solution is clearly not going to happen.”
Casado: Open Source Succeeds by Cannibalizing Markets, Not Innovating
“If you look at these examples of quote unquote successful open source companies, in almost every case, they were going after and cannibalizing an existing market, which is way more difficult than actually doing new innovation, right?”
Horowitz: Wartime CEOs must prioritize strict discipline over employee feelings
“It does get down to, look, there are times when you need so much precision that, like, if you're gonna lose somebody in the whatever war for talent because they got their feelings hurt, well, that's just gonna be how it's gotta be, because you need to Teach th…”
Horowitz: Stanford and Berkeley grads often lack veterans' sense of purpose
“And a lot of people come out of Stanford or, you know Berkeley Computer Center don't understand what that means and don't understand what it means to do something bigger than yourself. But if somebody's been in the Marines or, you know, and decided to do that,…”
Senghor: Most non-violent drug offenders engage in violence to protect interests
“Most people who are non-violent offenders, if you sold drugs, you had to be violent at some point to protect your interests. You just didn't get caught for a violent crime.”
Software requiring heavy professional services is fundamentally a bad product
“So, if you come from a services background, you treat services as a revenue stream. You start building products that require lots of services, and that's a bad product. Like, it turns out that that's almost the definition of a bad product, is it's really heavy…”
Janah: Aid-dependent governments prioritize foreign donors over their own citizens
“The great challenge in nonprofits, and you see this in international aid environments, is that, you know, country governments where the budget is largely composed of aid from richer countries are much more accountable to the donors than they are to their own p…”
Mason: Wealth concentration for philanthropy can beat employee redistribution
“Arguably it's better for one benevolent person to end up with all this money instead of just distributing it evenly among all the employees. Right. So that they can all buy, you know, slightly nicer cars and other, you know, materialistic things.”
Snyder: Kickstarter success depends on text structure rather than idea quality
“The quality of your idea doesn't matter just looking at the content aspects we could predict.”
Evans: For Google, Android is a tactic; for Apple, device is strategy
“For Google, Android is a tactic, and cloud is a strategy, whereas for Apple, the device is a strategy, and the cloud is a tactic. The cloud is a feature of the core strategy, whereas for Google, the device is a feature of the core strategy.”