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 6,975 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 83 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
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.”
Jordan: Fewer than five U.S. e-commerce companies hit $1B and stay profitable
“So, you know, one of the big secrets in e-commerce is virtually no companies get big and make money in the United States on e-commerce. I can name five e-commerce companies in the U.S. After two decades of investing and God knows how many tens of billions of d…”
AI outperforms internal human analysts at forecasting Novartis product sales
“The other area, interestingly, in the financial area as well, we find that AI does a great job predicting our free cashflow, predicting a lot of our sales for key products, and it does better than our internal people because it doesn't have the biases and the …”
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…”
No secret U.S. government lab possesses AI superior to commercial industry
“I am not breaking some, like, security clearance or classification rules to tell you this here, but there is no super secret government lab with, like, advanced AI way better than commercial industry. The government, the military, they are behind commercial in…”
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 …”
Andreessen: Low productivity growth contradicts claims of tech-driven job displacement
“Number one, today in the American economy, you actually have very low productivity growth, not very high productivity growth, which is counters against the argument that there's some level of unprecedented technological disruption that's happening, because you…”
Caplan: Average adult knowledge of core school subjects is near zero
“I've got data on knowledge of history, government, science, and foreign languages, in addition to literacy and numeracy. Literacy and numeracy, at least there's a credible story, but the other things that I just mentioned, there if you go and look at what adul…”
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…”
Andreessen: Harvard dropouts on day one are highly attractive to Silicon Valley
“So there is a phenomenon in Silicon Valley where if you get accepted at Harvard and you drop out on day one, you are much more attractive.”
Caplan: Increasing school choice does not significantly raise student test scores
“I've looked at least some of the research, and it seems like the idea that if there's a lot more school choice, this will raise test scores a lot, ah, doesn't seem to be true.”
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 …”
Rachleff: Wealthfront software outperforms Goldman Sachs' $15M accounts for $500
“So basically what we're trying to do is take the financial services that are delivered to the very wealthy through people called private wealth managers, automate those services and software so we can deliver it for account minimums of as low as 500 dollars, a…”
Collison: Bitcoin consumes 40 times more power than the Visa network
“Bitcoin is kind of inefficient enough that it uses 40 times the power of the Visa network, despite kind of a much lower throughput than the Visa network.”
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 …”
Cordova: Quantum computing's hard science is solved; the remaining challenge is engineering
“The hard science problems have been solved, but how do you build a superconducting qubit, and how do you Send it a radio frequency data to program it. The hard part now is is going through all the different ways that these things can be hooked together to buil…”
Morell: Snowden leaks damaged US tech companies' business overseas
“Edward Snowden Did serious damage to that relationship because the perceptions of the private sector covertly helping the government, whether those were true or not, but the perception that was created, right, of that significantly damaged some American compan…”
Harari: Neuroscience shows there is no single authentic self
“Science now tells us that when you look inside, you don't find any single authentic self. You find a cacophony of different conflicting voices that Well, none of which is your true self. There is just no such thing.”
Harari: Most people today have absolutely no military value
“Most people today have absolutely no military value.”
Mokyr: Industrial Revolution succeeded despite state institutions, not because of them
“The national institutions probably play a relatively secondary role. Quite frankly, you know, if you put a gun to my head, I would say what happened, happened despite the best efforts of these states, not thanks to them.”
Mokyr: Resistance to genetically modified organisms is baseless and fabricated
“The evidence does not support that there's any danger. This whole notion about frankenfoods is completely made up”
Osnos: Trump hired actors for his 2016 campaign announcement crowd
“He hired actors to flesh out the crowd at his announcement speech. He really did, meaning he didn't think that people were actually even going to come to his announcement”
Christensen: Online learning is rapidly disrupting Harvard Business School
“And, ah, online learning is improving at such a rapid rate that Harvard Business School is getting disrupted.”
Five well-known lines of code can bypass FireEye's security tools
“And so, you know, you look at FireEye, there are five lines of code that are well known that get you around FireEye. You look at Emmet, you look at a lot of these tools that are preventative, there are known ways to get around them.”
Wanstrath: Cyberattacks on GitHub aimed to suppress speech, not steal data
“And it's not about hacking or stealing information or trying to get passwords from us. It's about suppressing Speech.”
Wu: Supplement 'proprietary blends' are used to dump leftover ingredient inventory
“And the proprietary blend moniker, as you mentioned, Saku, is Essentially a code word for industry that whatever is on our shelf at the time, we can just dump in into your capsules.”
Brett Hagler: Red Cross raised $500M for Haiti but built six homes
“The Red Cross, this is an article that came out a couple months ago. They raised what was called a half billion dollars for Haiti after the earthquake. And they made a lot of promises to build homes and things like that. And after five years, they've built six…”
De Grey: Amyloid clearance is solved but requires combination therapies for Alzheimer's
“Well, in one case, Alzheimer's disease, that's also, that's very much in clinical trials, and we basically solve the problem. That can now be eliminated. It doesn't have much effect on Alzheimer's disease on its own, but it's a fair bet that in combination wit…”
Back: Everyone agrees Bitcoin needs a block size increase
“If we need to increase the block size, which I think everybody agrees with at this point in time.”
Back: Three or four colluding mining companies could influence Bitcoin policy
“You know, it's probably the case that you could, you know, If you could get collaboration from three, four companies in various parts of the world, you could start to apply some policy influence to Bitcoin.”
Ice Cube: LAPD's war on gangs targeted all Black and Brown youth
“You know, we was dealing with Daryl Gates, who was the chief of police in Los Angeles at the time, and he had declared a war on gangs. Now, to most law-abiding citizens, a war on gangs sound pretty good, but if they think every black teenager They run across, …”
Zetter: US government evidence attributing the Sony hack to North Korea is flimsy
“So the idea that the government would say definitively this is North Korea already is a little shaky. And what they've provided as evidence is an IP address that they say is, which they haven't even disclosed the IP address. All they've said is that an IP addr…”
Benioff: 90% of enterprise software is bought in just seven countries
“No. Because you have to remember a truth, which is that 90% of all enterprise software is only bought in seven countries.”
Carter: Homeland Security sought bureaucratic control of cyber defense without capability
“I could never get Homeland Security, quite honestly, because I thought they had the attitude that they wanted this bureaucratically. I mean, all bureaucracies want things, and they wanted this, but they didn't have the capability.”
Felten: Bitcoin's 21 million supply cap is changeable by community consensus
“Right now the monetary policy is grow asymptotically to twenty-one million Bitcoins, but that could change by consensus of the community. That twenty-one million limit is not inherent mathematically. It's just a number that is hardwired into the currently used…”
Li Jin: Mental health startup Basis uses unlicensed community coaches as therapists
“So one startup based in San Francisco is called Basis, and they're using unlicensed but trained people in the community to basically serve as therapists.”
Krugman: Cryptocurrency shows no sign of becoming real money
“The one thing I will say is so far cryptocurrency shows no sign whatsoever Of becoming currency. Whatever it's doing, it's not money.”
Fu: Wireless signals could trigger fatal heart rhythms in cardiac defibrillators
“We discovered we could actually generate our own wireless signals that would trigger this, what is effectively a debugging command to wirelessly induce fatal heart rhythms.”
Chen: AI models predict suicide risk years ahead with over 80% accuracy
“Study one basically looks through electronic health records and based on the data in electronic health records is able to predict people who are likely to commit suicide. And these people might be two or three years away from that event, but they are able to p…”
Chen: Most AV Experts Require LiDAR, With Tesla as Key Outlier
“Most people that I talk to think definitely LiDAR. There's a couple of big outliers. I think Tesla is trying a system without LiDAR, but we'll see.”
Verdian: AI reached $100B revenue in 4 years vs 15 for SaaS
“We've reached a hundred billion in revenue in AI. It took SaaS 15 years to get to the same point. AI did that in four years.”
Verdian: No prior tech wave addressed $30T in GDP simultaneously
“There hasn't been a technology paradigm that hits on 30 trillion in GDP at the same time.”
Verdian: Average 10-year VC return trails public markets at 1-2x net
“If you look at Cambridge data, the average venture return over the last 10 years is one to two x net. You will do better in private equity. You'll definitely do better in the public markets. You don't need to lock up your money for 10 years.”
Verdian: Cursor recently raised at a $400M valuation on $3M ARR
“Tell me if I'm wrong, three million ARR, four hundred million dollar round, or somewhere maybe around there.”
Verdian: Private equity is refusing to buy slow-growing seat-based software companies
“Even private equity today, when they're doing a new investment, they're looking for something that's AI native. They're not looking to buy a workflow software company growing 10% that's seed based. Like, that's just not happening.”