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 1,871 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
Burgum: Losing AI race to China is existential threat, not climate change
“The existential threat is not a degree of temperature change in 2100. The existential threat was Iran getting a nuclear weapon, ah, and losing the AI arms race to China. Those are the two top order bits in terms of priorities.”
Horowitz: Donald Trump is the right choice for startups and Little Tech
“For a little tech we think Donald Trump is actually the right choice”
Horowitz: Google and Microsoft push for centralized Chinese-style AI control
“Like we go to the China model that Google and Microsoft are advocating for this Chinese model of only a few can control AI. We're going to be in big trouble.”
Rowan: University protests are fundamentally anti-American and anti-system
“Israel, Palestine is not fully an anti-Semitic issue. And that's not what I saw at these universities. I saw it as an anti-American, anti-system issue.”
Andreessen: Social Reform Activists Are Driven by Greed and Power, Not Empathy
“They're neither empathetic nor, nor, nor are they suicidal, right? Rather quite the opposite. They're hateful and they're greedy. You know, they're sort of self-aggrandizing and gathering a power of resources for themselves.”
Karp: The Wealth Tax Exists to Penalize the Rich, Not Help Poor
“The wealth tax is a derivative of this because everyone knows the wealth tax isn't going to help the poor. It's just going to fuck the rich and that's enough to get it done.”
Horowitz: Defunding the police effectively terrorizes poor communities
“When you go defund the police, we're not gonna enforce law, you're basically terrorizing the poor community.”
Horowitz: Anthropic has the worst code security practices in AI
“Their reputation is they have the literally the worst security practices in the entire industry with respect to their own code.”
Andreessen: Paul Thomas Anderson's new film is 'Antifa the movie'
“Arguably, it is kind of salient to our times, because I think if you were to retitle the movie, you would just title it Antifa the movie. Like, it's, like, it's like a full-throated celebration of basically violent social change, violent social revolution, lik…”
Keith Rabois claims Jerome Powell lowered interest rates to help Kamala Harris
“I think he has Trump derangement syndrome. He just hates Trump. That's why he artificially lowered rates to try to get Kamala elected. It is indefensible cutting 50 basis points off in, you know, last fall.”
Best: Peer review is a mistake driving a crisis of fake science
“I think a lot of science is totally broken. I think that they're like, I think that a lot of the, and I think that the scientific project is incredibly important and one of the most valuable things in history, but that the practice of science and the Current s…”
Balaji Srinivasan: Journalism is the non-consensual invasion of privacy for profit
“So journalism, as the non-consensual invasion of privacy for profit, really captures what it is these critters do.”
Balaji Srinivasan: Media claims positive influence while denying negative societal impacts
“When it comes publisher time, they will admit that their stories led to something. But when it comes BLM time, they deny that their stories led to America, you know, half America getting burned down. So it's a one-way ratchet where they take all the credit and…”
Balaji Srinivasan: Musk's Twitter acquisition liberated Meta and YouTube from censorship
“X-Day was also the liberation of Meta and liberation of YouTube, right? All the countries that these racial fanatics at the NYT had occupied, right? All the networks they had occupied. That was like, you know how, like, the Nazi empire was at, like, its peak, …”
Balaji Srinivasan: San Francisco homeless NGOs profit from rising homelessness and addiction
“The homeless industrial complex, so that shows that the NGOs, as their budget rises, the homeless population rises with it. They're basically paid to get people addicted to drugs.”
Balaji Srinivasan: Cutting USAID funding destroys the Democratic institution business model
“Really, what's happening is the cutoff of USAID is rolling up Blue Empire, so it's killing the blue business model.”
Balaji Srinivasan: Democrats destroyed democracy in California and created a one-party state
“In California, elections are held, but the party always wins, exactly like China. Okay, Democrats destroyed democracy in California.”
Horowitz: Anthony Fauci is a sociopath completely divorced from the truth
“I think Fauci, you know, whether you like him or not, he is, I think he's, he, he's a bit of a sociopath. I mean, he is completely divorced from the truth. And he feels no guilt about it. The, you know, he never felt any guilt about the whole AIDS thing, despi…”
Casado: US AI export controls failed; regulation is sole obstacle to winning
“China is a lot of very smart people. They're incredibly capable. They're great researchers. They can build stuff as great as well as we can, and they can open source it. We did not enable them. They do this even with export controls on chips. Right? So there's…”
Horowitz: SEC aims to destroy crypto industry rather than protect consumers
“The SEC has been against that because they're not really for protecting consumers. They're you know, just for wrecking the industry.”
Horowitz: Excusing October 7th violence reflects a return to tribal morality
“You can kind of see some of that tribalism coming back. Back in America where people like, well, you know, it's kind of a race. Well, we see it a lot right now in the Israel-Palestinian conflict where they think there's a certain set of people that say, oh, Oc…”
Andreessen: Corporate HR parallel control structures mirror Soviet governance
“I do think we, I would say, big companies, large institutions have backed into a system that actually is very reminiscent of how the Soviets used to run things with respect to this kind of parallel control structure.”
Andreessen: The EU is determined to place blanket bans on capitalism
“The EU seems absolutely determined to ban everything to sort of put a blanket ban on capitalism and within that ban AI and ban energy.”
Horowitz: Coercing banks to debank legal industries mirrors fascist operational methods
“This is exactly how fascism worked. This is how Nazi Germany worked. They use private corporations to kind of confiscate people's stuff and you know, do these kinds of techniques to them.”
Horowitz: Rejecting Roland Fryer's police research led to a spike in murders
“What happened subsequently is his recommendation or his kind of ideas were not taken by society. What was taken were people who were kind of, who did far worse or no research. And, but were experts and, you know, kind of the result was the defund the police mo…”
Andreessen: Strongly supports the federal execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
“Anyway, I am strongly pro the execution of the Rosenbergs.”
Power: U.S. military-industrial readiness is actually a 3 out of 10
“It's a lethality mirage and a lethality mirage is basically, you know, everyone else's impression of you is that you are a 10 out of 10 lethal. So they absolutely not going to fuck with you. And then maybe you lose one small conflict and someone goes, well, ho…”
Balaji Srinivasan: Tech journalists act as hitmen for legacy inherited wealth
“A lot of these tech journalists are basically employees of some east coast nepotist Who's inherited millions of dollars and or a newspaper and is funding their whole operation. So they're meritless nepotous and or employees thereof who are attacking the self-m…”
Gil: Half of private unicorns are not worth $1 billion
“I would posit that about half of the unicorns are not worth a billion dollars or more. In other words, 50% of the companies that are valued in the private markets as being worth more than a billion shouldn't be worth more than a billion.”
Caplan: Schools should replace credentialed teachers with enthusiastic young non-graduates
“So, basically, it seems like we'd go and replace a lot of teachers from, you know, better schools, and with master's degrees, and with more experience, with just enthusiastic, fun, young teachers. You know, maybe people haven't even finished high school.”
Caplan: The ideal educational model is complete separation of school and state
“I think the best would be separation of school and state. And just get government out of education entirely.”
Harari: Swearing on the Bible is like swearing on Harry Potter
“And even when people testify in court, I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, they swear on the Bible, which is so full of fictions and myth and error. It's like you can swear on Harry Potter just the same.”
Buterin: Ethereum and Bitcoin are useless for many apps due to scalability
“So, you know, Ethereum, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Classic, and Bitcoin with Segwit, like, all four of those are just pretty much completely useless for a lot of what people want to do because the scalability just isn't high enough.”
Mason: Candidates objecting to progressive equity caps are bad fits
“In terms of the downside of executive recruiting, I mean, I just think anybody that feels like, ah, you know, you're capping me out or you're taxing me. I don't know. Like that person's an asshole. I don't really want to work with them.”
Andreessen: Consumers who use weak passwords should be held legally liable
“Consumers like who use bad passwords, like ought to be held liable for the consequence. Like consumers at some point, like at some point as an adult, you learn that when you leave your house at night, you lock the door, right? Consumers at some point are going…”
Katie Haun admits the majority of ICOs are frauds or scams
“Look, initial coin offerings or ICOs, I'll be the first to tell you, there is a tremendous amount the majority of them are, seem to be, Frauds or scams.”
Geoffrey Hinton: Backpropagation is a dead end for reaching general intelligence
“He says, I think we need a reboot. I think the path that I set everybody on, and fundamentally an algorithm called backpropagation, I think that's a dead end. I think if we want general intelligence, we're going to need to invent a new technique. We're going t…”
Chi: AI data vendors create gimmick benchmarks to sell data
“And actually a lot of that industry has now Built these gimmick style benchmarks as a mechanism to sell their data. And so that, that's become kind of their go-to-market as well.”
CCP Launders Anti-Data Center Campaigns Through TikTok, Asserts Gavin Baker
“Like there is an organized CCP funded campaign. I think against data centers here in America. Like I think a lot of it gets laundered through TikTok and it's just tragic because the other thing that's happening is this is re-industrializing America.”
Microsoft Failed to Build Competitive In-House Frontier AI Models
“They clearly tried to make a frontier model. They failed. You know, Satya said, we're gonna have our own models that are very competitive. Like, I think he said that 18 months ago. They don't have their own models that are competitive.”
Casado: Google's AI models are getting trounced by OpenAI and Anthropic
“Google is Google. They have all the data, they have all the intelligence and like their models are getting trounced. By open AI and by anthropic.”
Gaybrick: AI Agents Review Code Better Than Humans Did
“But even then agents are doing code review even better than humans did before.”
Horowitz: Uber's post-Kalanick culture became much more milquetoast
“The culture they went to, which was a reaction to the resistance, just ended up being a much more milquetoast culture than the original Uber culture was a special very pronounced culture.”
Garry Tan: AI startups will not replace incumbent giants like Microsoft
“There are real motes to these things. Like, there are structural reasons why a Microsoft isn't going anywhere. And then, I guess, This is sort of a little antithetical to what most, you know, most people in Silicon Valley would say, like, I want to start up to…”
Ayrey: AI alignment should prioritize cyber threats over nuclear weapon creation
“I think when it comes to alignment issues, no one needs to worry about these models making it materially easy to build nuclear weapons, because you need to procure fissile material to do that. It's not going to make it easier to build weapons. Everyone needs t…”
Moe: Open and closed AI models have no capability gap today
“In the end, there's not much differentiation. It's more about the distribution strategy and go-to-market strategy. And the capability wise, I don't really see a big gap, not even today, because for how these models are coming to being, they're really starting …”
Moe: Model distillation is not the primary driver of Chinese AI progress
“So I really don't think from currently what we're seeing this is a big cornerstone of what's powering the progress today. In the end, what's powering the progress is still just really smart people with very interesting algorithms, data environment, and they wi…”
Sreenivas: AI startups relying permanently on FDEs become glorified consultancies
“Once you know what the workflow is, you should not be relying on forward deployed engineers anymore, because once you know what the workflow is, If you can productize it, you should productize it and then become, you know, typical company with these scaling pr…”