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 4,336 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
Topol: Mass screening detects only 14% of cancers despite massive costs
“We only pick up 14% of cancers from that mass screening, which costs over hundreds of billions of dollars a year.”
Topol: Personalized vaccines are curing pancreatic and kidney cancers
“So vaccines now are capable Of cures of pancreatic cancer, kidney cancer, with these personalized vaccines using the proteins of the person's tumor.”
Vance: One Chinese firm outproduced post-WWII US shipbuilding in 2024
“In fact, one of Beijing's state-owned firms built more commercial ships just last year than all of America has produced since the end of World War II.”
Vance: Migrant border crossings dropped 94 percent last month
“Last month, migrant crossings were down 94% to their lowest number all time, and that happened just in two months of serious Border enforcement.”
Ian Webster: Anthropic Claude censorship matches DeepSeek on Chinese political topics
“Sure. Yeah. So, I mean, the level of censorship here is like Anthropic Claude is actually on par with DeepSeq.”
Schimpf: Wargames show key U.S. munition stockpiles run out in eight days
“You know, one of the areas where we see it is showing up with weapons, so when you look at these wargaming sort of scenarios, and you know, all these wargames are sort of questionable in their own ways but pretty consistently the stockpile of key U.S. Munition…”
Sheriff McMahill: Legalizing marijuana has failed to eradicate the black market
“The legalization of marijuana has done nothing to eradicate the black market of marijuana.”
Horowitz: Major tech and pharma CEOs couldn't get Biden administration meetings
“It's like every major, you talk to any major tech CEO of the biggest companies in the world of the, you know the biggest pharma companies in the world, none of them could get meetings with this administration.”
Andreessen: AI doomer Eliezer Yudkowsky advocates bombing data centers
“The AI version of that is, you know, Eliezer Yadkowsky's version of that is we must bomb data centers. Like, if there's a data center that we think might take off, like, if the training run starts to go too well, like, we need to send in the Air Force and be b…”
Andreessen: For every active US dockworker, another is paid to stay home
“For every doc worker in the U S actually works on the doc doc, there's actually somebody sitting, there's a doc worker sitting at home doing nothing, still getting paid.”
Dolgov: Waymo will continue using LiDAR, radar, and cameras together
“So yeah, I think the trend, you know, for us that we'll, you know, using all three modalities just, you know, makes a lot of sense.”
Horowitz: Biden administration sued to block a16z portfolio's Sanofi drug deal
“We have a company with an incredible drug platform. They cured. A rare disease, like past phase one clinical trials, carried it, sell the drug to Sanofi because, you know, so they can get some of the money back to develop more things, and the Biden administrat…”
Andreessen: California high-speed rail spent $10B with zero ground broken
“The California high-speed rail project. Which is now ten billion, it's over ten billion in spend with zero ground broken.”
Andreessen: FDIC blocked private equity and bank bids to buy SVB
“There were both there were other big banks that wanted to buy SVB, and there were private equity firms that wanted to buy SVB, and basically do a private sector bailout requiring no, no taxpayer involvement, and the FDIC actually blocked those also.”
Horowitz: FDIC rejected SVB buyer to avoid creating another G-SIB bank
“One of the blocks was there was a bank that was going to buy Silicon Valley bank and by buying Silicon Valley bank, it would move up into the G-SIB category, which is globally systemic important banks. And they're like, no more G-SIBs.”
Horowitz: Car thieves are not prosecuted in almost any blue state
“One of the big things that's changed in talking to many police officers is like grand theft auto is no longer a thing. Like if you steal a car, you don't get prosecuted in almost any state. Certainly in any blue state, you're not getting prosecuted for stealin…”
Casado: AI startups are the fastest-growing companies in internet history
“We're seeing the fastest growing companies we've seen in the history of the internet, including, by the way, the internet itself. And this is by measure for revenue or the number of users, et cetera, right?”
Hicks: DoD aims to field thousands of autonomous systems within 24 months
“Replicator's goal has always been simple and straightforward, to field thousands of attributable autonomous systems in multiple domains within 18 to 24 months, and to prove ways to burn down risk and rapidly and safely overcome barriers to scaling.”
Cuban: PBMs exclude $700 biosimilar Usimri to protect drug margin revenues
“Humira is about 8000 dollars a month. Six to 8000 dollars a month. USIMRI is about 700 dollars a month. But they won't add USIMRI to their formularies because they don't want to use the revenue in the margin.”
Cuban: Big three PBMs pay independent pharmacies $0.50 for $12 scripts
“If you're dealing with one of those big three PBMs, it cost an independent pharmacy probably 12 dollars, give or take, on the location to fill a script. They're paying them 50 cents”
Horowitz: Biden administration uses extra-legal regulatory pressure to choke crypto companies
“We're seeing you know, this administration do the same thing. In something called choke .2, but this time with crypto companies and, you know, there's no law that they're following. There's no rule. There's no legislation. There's no vote. There's no nothing. …”
Horowitz: Harvard enrolls more Nigerian than African American students
“There are more Nigerians. I believe there's more Nigerians at Harvard than African Americans.”
Horowitz: Higher Share of Women Enter STEM in Kazakhstan Than Sweden
“Way more women go into STEM in like Kazakhstan than in Sweden.”
Andreessen: American university faculty is radically politically polarized toward liberals
“It's an empirical observation that the faculty at American universities is now radically polarized on in, in one political direction. Radically, and we could also post a graph on this maybe, which is the numbers are like really radical. There's fields in which…”
Mensch: Mixtral matches Llama 2 70B performance at one-sixth the cost
“Mixtral is actually on par with Lama-to-seven TB while being approximately six times cheaper or six times faster for the same price.”
Robbins: Meta-studies show 60% of depression patients receive zero treatment benefit
“60% of the people that go in, according to meta studies, for treatment of depression with drugs and or therapy or both, 60% make zero improvement.”
Horowitz: Native American reservation system acts as an ineffective $65,000 UBI
“We have UBI for Native Americans. It's called the reservation system, and it's horrible. And, you know, it's 65,000 dollars a year a piece, and it does not do anything.”
Andreessen: More People Globally Have Smartphones Than Electricity or Running Water
“Sitting here today in 2023, the following is true. More people in the world have computers in the form of smartphones specifically and internet access than have electricity or running water in their homes.”
Horowitz: Native American reservation system is essentially UBI paying $65K yearly
“And the reservation system is essentially UBI. It's 65,000 dollars a year, I believe, per resident.”
Horowitz: Vinod Khosla tweeted that AI will replace human musicians
“Our friend Vinod Khosla, I think, had a tweet that got him in a lot of trouble where he said, like, you know, there won't be any more human musicians because the AI would just program whatever feeling, however you want to feel, they just program it for you.”
Amodei: AI training costs will hit $1B in 2024 and up to $10B in 2025
“I think that next year we're probably going to see from multiple players models on the order of one billion dollars, and in 2025 we're going to see models on the order of Several billion, I don't know, perhaps even ten billion dollars.”
Andreessen: Albert Einstein held pro-Soviet and pro-Stalinist views
“Einstein, unfortunately, and I know Einstein's, a lot of people consider Einstein to be a hero, not just scientifically, but morally, and the movie paints him as a, both a scientific and a moral hero, which is kind of the received wisdom. A little bit of an is…”
Weiss: NYT profile of Sam Bankman-Fried omitted political donations and fraud comparisons
“You have this 2000 word profile in the New York Times that doesn't mention the four hundred million dollars that he donated to Democratic candidates, that doesn't mention, you know, Madoff, Enron, like the kind of things that he's being compared to.”
Andreessen: Tesla deploys live autonomous software without federal testing, improving safety
“Tesla has been climbing the ladder on self-driving car functionality capability. They do new software releases, push live to car at night anytime they want. Those new releases are not being tested by any federal, the federal, you know, it's a, whatever it's no…”
Ukraine depleted three years of US missile inventory in three weeks
“We shipped the Ukrainians what we thought was three years of inventory of stinger and javelin missiles, which are shoulder mounted, really cheap missiles that can take out a tank or something. So for providing that to a human force in Taiwan or the Ukraine, it…”
Balaji Srinivasan: Euthanasia is Canada's sixth leading cause of death
“In fact, it's like the sixth leading cause of death and candid, like you can kill yourself, but you can't take an experimental drug.”
Gluchowski: Optimistic rollups cannot support Validium extensions due to game theory reliance
“There's another Type of roll-ups called optimistic roll-ups. They unfortunately cannot do this. They do not rely on math and cryptography. They rely on game theory and validators, and they cannot have this extension.”
Levine: No Open-Source Company Has Been Fully Displaced by Cloud Providers
“Can you name a single example of a company that's been fully displaced by a cloud provider? And the answer is no. And so I think that our concerns around large cloud vendors coming in and just co-opting an open source project and putting you out of business, t…”
Dapper Dan: Sonia Sotomayor represented Fendi during a raid on his store
“Sotomayor. Anybody know who she is? Sotomayor. She's a Supreme Court Justice. At this time, she's working for Fendi, as one of the lawyers for Fendi's. She comes in the store with the team.”
Church: Chinese government likely knew about CRISPR baby experiment
“I wouldn't characterize it as a solo effort. I've seen the author list. It's quite long, and I also find it unlikely that a government as technically astute and as engaged in observation would be unaware of such an important thing.”
Cal Turner Jr. fired his brother as COO to avoid bankruptcy
“The hardest and toughest decision I ever had to make was the decision to fire my brother. Who was the chief operating officer, and the company was really in trouble. We were on the verge of chapter 11, and when you're in that situation, and the CEO and the COO…”
ICIJ uncovered $20 billion in offshore wealth linked to Vladimir Putin's associate
“Yeah, arguably the biggest story that came out of the Panama Papers was that we found about twenty billion dollars that was being funneled through offshore companies, That was linked to a guy in Russia who was the godfather of Vladimir Putin's child. And here …”
Caplan: Teaching students "how to learn" is mostly wishful thinking
“In the book I review what educational psychologists have determined about this, and the main result is that most of this learning how to learn or learning how to think stuff is wishful thinking. Most of the time when someone learns a subject, the most that the…”
Caplan: Standard credentials and seniority do not predict actual teacher effectiveness
“The main thing known is none of, like, the obvious social science measures of teacher quality predict teacher quality. So, having credentials from better schools, or having more credentials, or even more experience, none of the standard things that are in the …”
Benet: Academic research proved doubling Bitcoin block size has minimal impact
“The debates that have been raging for the last two years are about relatively minor things, so increasing the block size became this huge holy war, and when you step back and look at what they're talking about, it's just increasing one factor, either by, you k…”
Sutton: Emotional intelligence is only 10% as important as IQ
“EQ is one of the most overrated concepts on the planet. It's there, it matters, but if you look at the evidence, it's about, a good guess, 10% as important as old-fashioned IQ.”
Levinson: Reagan and Thatcher's free-market policies failed to boost productivity
“This was what was behind the political swing to the right in the late 19 seventies, early 19 eighties, when we got Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, because the more social democratic type of governments before that hadn't been able to restart productivity …”