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 438 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 10 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
Levie: China's open source AI is only 1-3 months behind US frontier
“There's an open source ecosystem in, in China that is near neck and neck. Let's say at least still maybe kind of, you know, one to three months behind, but not a year or two years behind.”
Lonsdale: AI-native startups will crush incumbents by redesigning workflows from scratch
“It's so hard to like re-engineer how some of these things work based on what's possible today. That they're just going to get crushed by new companies started by younger people who are like, maybe not even younger necessarily, but people who are just doing thi…”
Levie: Fear of AI job destruction ignores how markets adapt and reinvest
“So if you believe in job destruction, like in any kind of very large scale way, you basically don't believe that markets adapt and you basically don't believe that some other company will emerge and say, I'm gonna just do this way better. And the way I'm going…”
Technologists unilaterally deciding global policy is 'tyranny by tech bro'
“You know, cause the alternative, you could say Theodore Hall was essentially tyranny by tech bro. You know, he decided global policy and it had huge consequences. On the other end, there's a true deep commitment to democracy, even when it feels uncomfortable.”
Ross: In five years, workers will one-shot custom software, making SaaS worthless
“If you take the five year view, kids who are in college today who come out and start working in a construction company or something are going to look at every problem they're paying for software and say, this doesn't do exactly what I need. And I can one shot …”
Kolicich: AI is not a bubble and is probably still under-hyped
“And I think it's an emphatic, no, it's not a bubble. Probably it's still a little under hyped.”
Lonsdale: Russia funded European green parties to halt fracking and eliminate competition
“They funded the green parties, they funded the protests, and they turned off fracking in Europe because it's so good for the environment. They tricked everyone because obviously they don't want competition.”
Hughes: 90% of New World Slaves Were Captured by African Tribes
“90% of the slaves that came to America or came to the new world, let's say, were originally captured and enslaved by other African tribes, by stronger African tribes, by victorious African tribes, and were sold to Europeans. Not at the point of a gun, but just…”
Hughes: Claim That American Revolution Fought to Preserve Slavery Is False
“The most controversial, and because it was false and poorly researched, was the idea that the 13 colonies rebelled against Britain in order to preserve slavery. That, the idea they were afraid that Britain was about to take their slaves, or about to emancipate…”
Hughes: 1619 Project Ignored Historian Leslie Harris's Fact-Checking Warnings
“They got this historian, Leslie Harris, who is a very respected historian and happens to be a black woman as well. Hey, like, look at this before we vet it. And she raised a huge red flag. She says, oh, hold on. This is totally not true, right? And they were l…”
Hughes: Birth Control Accelerated Out-of-Wedlock Births by Eroding Shotgun Marriage
“Akerloff argues once those things come on board, you get this slow diffusion of a totally new market terms where, you know, people expected birth control and the pill to get rid of unwanted pregnancies, but it actually had the opposite effect because it destro…”
Hughes: Slave-Picked Cotton Accounted for Only 3% of 19th-Century US Economy
“American exports peaked at six percent in In the 19th century. So it was half of six percent, meaning three percent. Three percent of our economy was due to slave picked cotton.”
Sandler: Prosecutor Admitted Lowell Milken Was Indicted to Pressure Michael
“When we asked us specifically about the dive in a low milk and he acknowledged the fact that Lowell would not have been indicted if it wasn't to bring pressure on his brother.”
Sandler: Milken pleaded to offenses never criminally prosecuted before or since
“None of which, and this is why I go in great detail in the book so people understand how in many ways ridiculous it is, none of which had ever been the subject of a criminal prosecution before or since.”
Loeffler: Biden Administration Tried to Forgive $200B in Pandemic Loans
“The Biden administration tried to forgive those loans, sweep it under the rug to the tune of about two hundred billion dollars.”
Loeffler: SBA revoked USAID authority over a $700M migration study contract
“Well, yeah, and the SBA earlier last year had to remove USAID's contracting authority because they were blowing out these programs. Eight programs for seven hundred million dollars for one contract to detect the root causes of migration into the United States.…”
Isaacman: NASA leadership failures, not Boeing, caused Starliner issues
“I didn't blame Boeing. I blamed leadership failures and poor decision-making at NASA to make sure our culture is going the right direction.”
Ross: Market speculation creates real business value by attracting top talent
“I think the funny thing about America is that we love speculation and speculation actually creates real value. People think of speculation as this bad thing, but in the case, in this case, we sort of got really lucky in that there was this meme stock moment fo…”
Ross: Mid-market SaaS will be worthless in five years due to AI
“I think it's a barbell thing. Like, the large AI companies are gonna eat the top end of value, and everyone in the middle is gonna just commoditize, or people who aren't even in the software business. Like, in the next two or three years, this isn't true, righ…”
Lonsdale: OpenAI Keeps Failing in Attempts to Capture the Enterprise Market
“I think they're bad at enterprise. I think they don't have the, I think they keep trying and they're not succeeding. Maybe they'll get it though. I don't know.”
Kolicich: AI is not a bubble and remains underhyped
“And I think it's an emphatic, no, it's not a bubble. Probably it's still a little underhyped.”
Mandia: AI-native software developers are over 100 times more productive.
“It's not 10 X. It's more than a hundred X productivity with an AI native developer working on software.”
Atkins: Prior SEC pursued crypto regulation through enforcement with antiquated rules
“Unfortunately the SEC started by looking at crypto as maybe the ostrich with the head in the sand, as was their attitude. Like maybe this stuff will go away by the time we lift our head out of the sand. That obviously didn't happen. And then came the very basi…”
Atkins: Past SEC practices drove crypto asset trading offshore
“The trouble with the past practices of the, Commission is that it drove trading of crypto assets offshore.”
Atkins: Politicized activists with minimal shares weaponize shareholder proposals
“So unfortunately, these have been weaponized to push particular views or issues by certain I call them politicized shareholder activists. So they, yes, they own shares, but a very, usually a very minimal number of things.”
Kupor: OPM Is Implementing Forced Curve Ratings Across Federal Government
“We're doing this in our, in the, across the government is you have to kind of effectively legislate you know, effectively a force curve in order to change this behavior. So you have done that at senior levels of the organization. Yeah, we're doing it. We're do…”
Howard: Slow Environmental Reviews Dramatically Harm the Environment
“All these lengthy environmental reviews turn out to be dramatically harmful to the environment because we can't fix the bottlenecks. We can't create the new transmission lines that carry electricity from the, you know, renewable sources and such. It's overwhel…”
Ridley: The idea that China will overtake the US is outdated
“I think the idea that China is about to overtake the U.S. Is looking out of date, actually.”
Liemandt: Paying students directly is the most effective educational incentive
“Yeah. No, paying the kids is by far the most effective way to do it. And you can get, you know, big effect size on, on doing this. It really works.”
Liemandt: Two decades of VC-backed EdTech have completely failed
“Lots of VCs has funded lots of ed tech. None of it works. Right? There's our ed tech investment goes like this, test scores keep going down.”
Liemandt: Core academics are the easiest part of schooling to fix
“Academically, it's actually funny, because school's a bundle, and actually the easiest and cheapest things to fix is actually the academics, right? Because that's tech-driven. Versus the rest of the day is all very human driven.”
Liemandt: Alpha students learn twice as much in just two hours
“In our model, right, we have built a learning engine that teaches kids 10 times faster. And so how that reacts or how you see it in our school is our kids come in, our students come in two hours a day. They're at an AI tutor. It's not Teacher in front of the c…”
Liemandt: Alpha School Ranks in Top 1% Nationally Across All Classes
“And so our academic performance, we're the best performing academic school in the country. We're, you know, all our classes now are, you know, are top one percent.”
Liemandt: 90% of Students Use ChatGPT to Cheat
“If you deploy ChatGPT to students,
90% of them use it to cheat.”
Carvalho: American elites failed in recent crises and need a reset
“We saw through many examples in the past few years that our elites are, in some ways, failing us. We're talking, if we think about COVID, the summer of 2020, if we think about October seventh, and we think about what happened in the past few weeks these are ex…”
Carvalho: UATX curriculum is explicitly designed to uphold Western civilization
“No, no, but an university has a duty, I believe, in especially where we sit here in America, to be an institution that is pro-decivilization, that is trying to uphold the civilization and move the civilization forward. So that's a very opinionated position. Th…”
Lonsdale: Explicitly illiberal ideologues should not run university departments
“I feel like if someone is clearly illiberal, if they're clearly an Islamist who's trying to conquer for Islam, if they're clearly a communist who's trying to You know, conquer with communism and push that, like, they probably shouldn't be running our departmen…”
Carvalho: University presidents speak out of both sides of their mouths
“Presidents doing exactly what you said, right? They speak with both sides of their mouths. Inside, they do one thing to the donors and boards that are coming with a particularly different worldview. They speak in a different way.”
Carvalho: 1960s Brazilian military intervention prevented a harsh communist regime
“The military had to intervene in order to protect Brazil from going into a totalitarian regime. So you saw this paradox of, you know, an illiberal intervention was needed to provide, to protect against a much harder, more strong illiberal intervention.”
Carvalho: Inequality Is a Vital Premise of a Free Society
“A very important premise of a free society is inequality.”
Carvalho: Brazilian Supreme Court forced critical journalists into US exile
“We have a number of journalists living in America right now that were critical of the government. And had to leave the country because the whole idea of combating fake news, for example, got into a, you know, if Biden was bad about trying to go into Twitter an…”
Carvalho: State University Civics Centers Are One Election Away from Destruction
“I think that they are good efforts, but the reality is that they are very tiny little things inside of a, they are a little, you know, virus inside of a host that's rejecting it strongly. And they got forced upon the university by the political system outside,…”
Stitt claims building housing exacerbates homelessness by attracting more people
“You can never build enough houses for homeless because you're just going to keep attracting more and more and more people.”
Stitt deployed Oklahoma Highway Patrol to give Tulsa campers an ultimatum
“I sent my highway patrol in to clean up Tulsa. And we first went in and told them, you're not allowed to camp here. Ah, we gave them one day to get away, and then the next day we showed up, and we basically said, we're going to give you a couple options. We wi…”
Stitt says 99% of people in Tulsa encampments chose to leave
“99% of the people, they just leave because this is a lifestyle and they haven't hit rock bottom yet. And they're literally just getting on the train tracks and walking on to the next community.”
Stitt claims homeless nonprofits raise more money when crises worsen
“Nonprofits, the way they make money, Is not by solving these problems. They can make, they can raise more money if they keep, if it gets worse and they keep talking about it. And so when you create all these services, you're going to be attracting more and mor…”
Lonsdale claims Biden's HUD forced facilities to allow drug use
“For a while, HUD, the national government was actually coming in under the Biden administration, and it was forcing people to allow people to use drugs in their treatment areas”
Stitt says Oklahoma plans to institute long-term civil psychiatric commitments
“That's one thing Oklahoma's looking at is, if you have some serious mental issues, we are going to get you into, we're going to prosecute you, that's part of Trump's executive order, we're going to commit you long term.”