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 5,135 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 50 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
Friedberg: 70-80% of late-stage startups are below their preference stack
“In the private market, you've got to assume that something in that late stage market is on the order of 70, 80% is worth less than their preference stack.”
Sacks: Former employee claimed Google trained its AI using ChatGPT
“And the proof of that is there was just a lawsuit a couple of days ago, or at least a claim by a former employee of Google who quit because he said that they were using ChatGPT to train Their AI.”
Sacks: U.S. Ukraine spending run rate exceeds the Afghanistan war rate
“I know the spending run rate of this war is actually greater than what we did in Afghanistan and Afghanistan ended up being a. 20 year multi-trillion dollar operation that just flushed all that money down the drain.”
Chamath: Even a traditional bank run cannot revive the crypto market
“Nothing can revive the crypto market as we're seeing today, even in a run on the bank, which is exactly what everybody was afraid of in a Bitcoin world. That thing is down.”
Chamath: Breast cancer surgeries currently have a 30% error rate
“Breast cancer surgeries, the dirty secret of our healthcare industry is that has a 30% error rate.”
Sacks: OpenAI leaders shifted from non-profit to for-profit to enrich themselves
“You start with a nonprofit whose jobs promote AI ethics, and in the process of that, the people who are running it realize they can enrich themselves to an unprecedented degree that they turn it into a for-profit.”
Sacks: FBI, CIA send big tech instructions via Teleporter
“The deep state, the, you know, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, even the CIA is having weekly meetings with these big tech companies, not just Twitter, but we know like a whole panoply of them, and basically giving them disappearing instructions t…”
Palihapitiya claims transformer LLMs trained on identical data yield identical answers
“I'm saying when you look at transformer architecture today, every LLM that you write on the same corpus of underlying data for training will get to the same answer.”
Sacks: Over 50% of Twitter engineers hadn't checked in code in months
“The first question he asked in the engineering department is who's checked in code. And they looked at the code repository and over 50% of the engineering department had not checked in code in months.”
Friedberg: Moderna vaccine myocarditis risk up to 30x higher in young people
“The incidence rate is still typically less than two out of every 100,000 people that get the vaccine. But as you saw in the paper you just shared and others have validated it can be as high as 30 times more likely to happen in young people that take the Modern…”
Friedberg: COVID lockdowns yielded zero benefits while accumulating trillions in costs
“Ultimately, the benefit was zero, because we ended up accumulating, call it 10 trillion dollars of, you know, four trillion dollars of net costs that we have to pay off at some point, not to mention the economic consequences of the lockdowns. And, ah, you know…”
Sacks: 99% of homeless individuals suffer from mental illness or addiction
“Schellenberger's done the work. It's like he said, 99% of the people he talks to, it's either mental illness or addiction, but we keep using this word homeless to describe the problem.”
Sacks: Exxon is a top-ranked ESG company while Tesla is excluded
“Here's all you have to know about ESG is that Exxon is like the number seven, like top-ranked company according to ESG, and Tesla isn't even on the list.”
Shellenberger: FBI constantly pushed legal boundaries requesting Twitter user info
“FBI was constantly pushing the boundaries of what is legally and ethically acceptable in terms of requesting information.”
Shellenberger: Living unsheltered on the street is three times deadlier than staying in a shelter
“Three times more people die living outside as an unsheltered homeless person rather than live, than being in a shelter.”
Chamath: VC industry has $1T globally in paper value at risk
“Well, if you do the math, the sum of the area above this black line is almost a trillion dollars around the world, and it is about six hundred billion dollars For U S venture capitalists.”
Calacanis: Twitter Files confirm secret blacklists tagged conservative voices
“We now have confirmation that what the right thought was happening all along, which is a secret silencing system built into the software. Of blacklists was tagging right-wing conservative voices in the system.”
Calacanis: Twitter placed Jay Bhattacharya on a trends blacklist
“And then there were people who were banned from the trends blacklist, including a Stanford professor, Jay Bhattacharya.”
Sacks: Twitter Files prove executives lied about shadowbanning political viewpoints
“You had statement after statement by Twitter executives like Jack Dorsey, like Vijaya, Gadi, like, you know, Yoel and others saying we do not shadow ban. And then they also said, we certainly, this is their emphasis, do not shadow ban on the basis of political…”
Sacks: Twitter suppressed Libs of TikTok despite admitting no policy violation
“There are conversations in the Slack that Barry Weiss exposed where, for example, Libs of TikTok, they admit in the Slack that we can't suppress Libs of TikTok based on our hate policy. Libs of TikTok hasn't violated it. We're going to suppress that account an…”
Sacks: Twitter suppressed Hunter Biden laptop story before 2020 election
“What he did was confirm that a completely true story by the New York Post about Hunter Biden that came out a month before the election was suppressed by Twitter executives, including at the behest of, you know, of FBI agents and former security state officials…”
Sacks: FBI warned social networks to suppress authentic Hunter Biden laptop story
“A very important piece of this was the pre-bunking that the FBI went to Facebook and Twitter and social networks and said, be on the lookout for a story about Hunter Biden. It is Russian disinformation. And they primed these social networks to suppress that st…”
Sacks: FBI knew Hunter Biden's laptop was authentic in 2019
“The FBI was given the laptop in 2019 by the lap store, store owner. Those guys have forensics. They have cyber experts. They knew the laptop was real. We know it's real now. Nobody questions that. In fact, the FBI has admitted that the laptop was real and that…”
Sacks: Intelligence officials falsely claimed Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation
“There was a letter with this Hunter Biden thing. This is a 2020 election, Jason. We're not going back two elections ago. I wanted to talk about the most recent one. You had Clapper. You had Comey. You had 50 of these security state officials. They write a lett…”
Sacks: Twitter execs maintained hack framing despite internal pushback
“Jim Baker and Vijaya Gotti said, okay, that there were a lot of internal questions about whether that, that Hunter Biden story could be justified under the hacked policy. And there were many legitimate questions raised internally about whether they could maint…”
Calacanis: Kevin O'Leary received $15 million to represent FTX
“Kevin O'Leary who calls himself Mr. Wonderful was on CNBC trying to defend the fact that he was given This is stunning, by the way, 15 fucking million dollars to be a spokesperson for FTX.”
Sacks: Semafor framed FTX as bank run after taking SBF's money
“And then Semaphore, who was on the take, who received millions of dollars in his money, said it was a run on the bank.”
Calacanis: NYT pivoted to partisan activism to drive subscriber growth
“When Trump came in, a generation of new journalists became activist journalists. They didn't want to tell stories and take it straight down the middle and let the facts tell the story and let the audience make their own decision. They felt an existential risk.…”
Sacks: SBF gave zero donations to the Republican Party
“How many donations did he give to the Republican party? None.”
Friedberg: 2020 Georgia Senate runoff cost the US $10 trillion
“I think the Georgia Senate runoff race that we had. In the 20 20 election cost the US 10 trillion dollars.”
Chamath: Silicon Valley VCs taught founders how to launch tokens
“There was a lot of venture firms in Silicon Valley in this period of both not doing any work or diligence who also took the extra step and actually created classes and would teach teams how to create these tokens. Okay. And those artifacts, those video links a…”
Sacks: Twitter's racist post surge was a 4chan bot attack
“What happened is that within hours of Elon taking over the company on Friday, there was a four Chan attack where basically people from this message board created bots to post hundreds of thousands of spam messages that contained Racist words and epithets.”
Sacks: Fed experts and MMT caused inflation and financial crisis
“Populous did not cause 10 trillion dollars of money printing. It was modern monetary theory. And the experts of the Fed who did that. It wasn't Populous who created the great financial crisis of 2008 that caused the Zerp, and we're still living with all the do…”
Sacks: House Progressive Caucus members recanted Ukraine diplomacy letter after backlash
“There was the big event in the Ukraine war debate this week was that the House Progressive Caucus put out a letter signed by 30 progressive members to merely suggest that while we continue to fund Ukraine on a virtually unlimited basis, we also, in parallel, o…”
Sacks: Prominent foreign policy figures historically warned against NATO expansion
“Back in the 19 nineties, you had people like George Kennan, who was the architect of our Cold War containment policy. You had William J. Perry was Bill Clinton's defense secretary. You had Henry Kissinger, you had John Mearsheimer, all warned that bringing NAT…”
Chamath: Recommendation algorithms constitute editorial decision-making
“There is an algorithm that is doing that. It's making an editorial decision around what the right answer is. They have deemed it to be right. And that is just true.”
Sacks: PayPal engages in financial retaliation against users over political views
“You have companies like PayPal, which are just engaging in retaliation, basically financial retaliation, purely on based on what political viewpoints they have.”
Chamath: US boomers are 1% of global population, controlling 14% of wealth
“It's one percent of the global population that controls one seventh of the global wealth. And they're all in the United States.”
Chamath: BYJU'S lost $600M and booked revenues from unpayable family loans
“Essentially showed instead of like breaking even or making money, they lost almost six hundred million dollars this year, and that a lot of the revenue that they were booking were actually loans to millions of Indian families who had basically zero probability…”
Sacks: US military rewrote battle plans and directs Ukraine's counteroffensive
“America is now giving Ukraine more and more advanced weapons. Okay. This sort of the long range artillery. They're telling them where to point the weapons. They're giving them the intelligence for it. They're training them on how to use it. They've got command…”
Palihapitiya: Donald Trump was right about German reliance on Russian gas
“And in hindsight, and I'm saying this as a Democrat, he was right about the German reliance on Russian gas and the European reliance on gas.”
Sacks claims Boris Johnson advised Ukraine against early peace deal with Russia
“Boris Johnson went to Ukraine and said, no deal, do not take the deal. We need to weaken Putin and Russia, not compromise with them.”
Sacks: NATO expansion contradicted U.S. assurances given to Mikhail Gorbachev
“This was basically a contradiction of the verbal assurances that James Baker and President George Herbert Walker Bush had given Gorbachev that we would not expand NATO one inch eastward.”
Sacks: U.S. completely refused to negotiate on Russia's pre-war security demands
“The fact of the matter is we never were willing to negotiate at all on those two demands at all.”
Sacks: Western sanctions against Russia have hurt Europe more than Russia
“The third Contention that was made by advocates of this proxy war is that the sanctions would hurt Russia more than Europe. That has not happened. Europe is already hurting more than Russia. And it's about with winter coming, it's going to hurt even more.”
Sacks: California public workers earn 53% to 100% more than private sector
“The typical government worker in California makes 53% more than their private sector counterpart. And if you factor in all the pensions that have been promised, it's a hundred percent more.”