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 20 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
Johnson: Diverse, lower-IQ groups outperform homogeneous, high-IQ groups in complex decisions
“You take groups of high IQ individuals who are all from the same, say academic background or economic background and have them make a complicated group decision. And then you take a group of actually lower IQ people, but who come from diverse fields, professio…”
Johnson: Diverse members make insider groups more creative without even speaking
“The presence of difference in a group makes the kind of initial kind of insiders more open to new ideas. If you have kind of an insider group, a homogeneous group, and you bring in folks who bring some kind of difference, even if they don't say anything, the i…”
Johnson: Famous political experts predict the future worse than random chance
“All the experts are like worse than a dart throwing chimp at predicting the future. And the more famous you got, the worse you were at”
Johnson: Sci-fi predicts the future more accurately than official forecasters
“I mean, I certainly think that you would find more things that ended up happening in fictional accounts than, you know, official people making predictions about the future outside of a fictional context.”
Steven Johnson: Extraterrestrial civilizations contacted by Earth will be more advanced
“By definition, they are going to be more advanced than we are, which is a whole complicated reason why that is, but they will be.”
Johnson: Blockchain Models Are Needed for Sustainable Open Internet Protocols
“Some of the blockchain Models and some of the token economy stuff that, that you've written about as a way of creating sustainable business models for open protocols, basically, which is what we really kind of need.”
Steven B. Johnson: The most consequential decisions are slow decisions
“The decisions that really matter the most are slow decisions, are decisions that have a much longer both time span in terms of how much time you spend deliberating them, and then also the time span of their consequences.”
Johnson: Pros and cons lists remain the primary decision tool since 1837
“That technique of creating a pros and cons list, basically that was state of the art in 1837, 1838. And it's still kind of state of the art for most people. That's the one tool they have for making a complicated decision.”
Johnson: Scenario planning builds agility even when predictions prove wrong
“The predictions don't even have to be right on some level for it to be a useful exercise, because a lot of this is about recognizing the uncertainty that's involved in any of these kinds of choices. It's creating a mindset that's open to unpredictable events. …”
Johnson: Science Fiction Serves as a Vital Long-Term Decision-Making Tool
“This is why science fiction is such an important kind of cognitive tool because you run these alternate scenarios of the future and they help us kind of imagine what direction we should be steering in, even if they're made up stories.”
Johnson: Computer simulations of complex personal emotional choices remain far off
“And that we don't have the luxury of simulating an alternate version of our lives. Cause we can't do that yet. We probably won't be able to do that for a long time, particularly the kind of emotional Complexity of choosing to marry someone or something like th…”
Steven B. Johnson: Breakthrough innovators are defined by having many hobbies
“A lot of the people who really are able to have these big breakthrough ideas, One of their defining characteristics is that they have a lot of hobbies.”
Johnson: Framing choices as binary 'whether-or-not' options drives decision failure
“And folks have looked at one of the key predictors of a failed decision is it was a whether or not decision. There was just one alternative, like, should we do this or not?”
Johnson: Important ideas enter the mainstream from the margins of society
“So sometimes ideas that are important and that need to happen come into the mainstream from the margins.”
Johnson: Crypto marks first time governance is built into software code
“But now really for the first time, the governance is actually built into the code”
Johnson: Machine intelligence will become key component of decision-making diversity
“The diversity is actually going to be also machine intelligence too, right? And increasingly, Part of that intellectual cognitive diversity is going to involve machine intelligence.”
Johnson: Novels train brain empathy systems better than other art forms
“Novels, in a sense, train the, kind of, empathy systems in the brain because you're sitting there like projecting your own mind into the mind of another listening to their inner monologue, their kind of consciousness in a way that almost no other art form can …”
Steven Johnson: Interstellar messaging consequences are delayed by thousands of years
“What I just love about it is just because of the speed of light and the distance you have to travel to these planets, this is a decision that by definition can't have a consequence for at least, you know, 5000 to 50,000 years, depending on the planet you're ta…”