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 10 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
Silver: Politics discourages critical thinking and encourages confirmation bias
“I just don't think that like politics teaches people to think critically and it's like, yeah, part of that is like, they're not thinking probabilistically, but it's more like people just want to see their kind of priors confirmed.”
Silver: Silicon Valley grasps scale, whereas social media flattens all discourse
“One thing that people in Silicon Valley get right for all their faults and self-servingness in some ways, right, They kind of get the orders of magnitudes, right? They understand scale and social media and the daily news cycle really collapses that, right? So …”
Silver: VC investing requires being six to twelve months ahead of the curve
“In VC, I mean, you might want to find a founder or a sector or a company that's undervalued by the market, but eventually you want that sector to grow. You want to attract more talent. You want to attract future fundraising rounds. So you kind of are more bein…”
Silver: The most successful gamblers do not care much about money
“The most successful gamblers don't actually care that much about money.”
Nate Silver: Almost every modern US election is a change election
“Almost every election now is a change election.”
Nate Silver: Conditional on winning Senate, Democrats almost certainly win House
“They're almost perfectly correlated. So if the odds of Democrats winning the Senate, but not the House are like one percent, if you go to Kalshi or Polymarket, whatever else, they have to be like around one percent. So conditional on Democrats winning the Sena…”
Nate Silver: Successful gamblers require comfort with uncertainty, not just probability
“Really obvious one is that successful gamblers think probabilistically. It's not just a matter of understanding probability, but being comfortable with uncertainty, being willing to take bets on an uncertain basis.”
Silver: Successful gamblers must be contrarian to maintain a market edge
“Successful gamblers are contrarian, at least to some degree. And again, I'm kind of repeating myself a little bit, but there's no edge if someone, if everyone does the same thing in the same way.”
Silver: Gut intuition is ineffective for forecasting rare events like elections
“I think people can, in matters that happen only occasionally, like a presidential election, people think, well, my gut is that so-and-so will win. You don't have enough practice at forecasting elections to really, for that to be very useful, right?”