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 564 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
Penner: Self-Pity in Adversity Weakens People and Prevents Rebounding
“In moments of challenge and failure, you could react in many different ways, and one of them is you could feel victim. You could feel sorry for yourself, like, oh man, this bad thing happened to me, or this person did this bad thing to me, or just bad luck, or…”
Hughes: Big-Tent Groups Allowing Conservative Views Get Smeared as Right-Wing
“If you're allowing conservative perspectives, you will be smeared as a conservative or right-wing organization, even if you're aspiring to be a big tent organization.”
Hughes: Race is a poor proxy for economic disadvantage
“Race is not correlated with who's poor and who who's rich or rather it's correlated, but it's not the best proxy. Right. It's much better to simply look at people's tax returns and income if you want to see who's rich.”
Hughes: Colorblindness Means Disregarding Race in Treatment, Not Denying It Exists
“We should all be trying to treat people without regard to race. Once we see race, we ought to disregard it as a reason to treat anyone differently. That's the real argument.”
Hughes: Black Americans Share Almost No Cultural Commonality With Ethiopians
“What does a black American have in common with an Ethiopian? Culturally, almost nothing.”
Jones: Colorblindness is a myth; the real issue is attached prejudices
“There's no such thing as colorblind. You need to see color. Seeing color is the most beautiful thing in the world. It's what we attach to that color.”
Lonsdale: Government Interventions Often Create Worse Failures Than Market Failures
“Very often, just because there's a market failure, you try to intervene, the government failure is worse.”
Winston: Economics focuses on market failures while ignoring government failures
“So the theoretical instincts is that were that the action is really in market failures and very little attention Was given the government failures. And so as things go on, people think, yeah, market failure is a problem. They never stepped back and said, well,…”
Winston: Retrospective assessments are not part of government policymaking agendas
“There's a sort of, you know, checklist of things that you want to go through, but obviously this is not what government does, because you can have failure along at any of these points, and more often than not, we just go ahead with things, and there's never be…”
Ruth: Most technical classes train students to be third-rate computers
“Most technical classes now, they prepackage the problem for you, and they say, here's an equation, solve for x, or, you know, and you spend all of this time being a third-rate computer.”
Pahlavi: Civil disobedience movements cannot succeed without external foreign support
“This is why I think the external component is also key because I haven't seen any successful movements based on civil disobedience without involving foreign elements in terms of where all that.”
Baker: US deficit financing via printed money creates self-reinforcing inflation
“Initially there was a lot of inflation when you, when you're running hot like we are today, and you're financing a huge fiscal deficit like we are today with printed money like we are today, you get into this self-reinforcing inflationary cycle like we had in …”
Baker: Asset bubbles are always caused by central bank over-printing
“The thing that causes that is always an economically inappropriate amount of central bank printing, and what started in the nineties was, this was really the first time any foreign banks had been materially involved in U.S. Debt purchases.”
Baker: AI productivity redistributes income from displaced workers to adopting companies
“Productivity is income saved by companies that use AI and income lost by the workers that they no longer have to hire. You know, it's a force that redistributes income within the economy”
Baker: Central Bank Constraints Will Reopen Massive Opportunities for Alpha Macro Strategies
“Macro has been a challenged environment for 10 years because volatility has been suppressed by the central banks. They smooth everything out. They've printed a bunch of money, created a lot of dislocations. So if they're not able to do that anymore because the…”
Verdon: Societies must maintain startup-like adaptability to maximize growth fitness
“And so one of the sort of core tenets is to maintain variance, maintain adaptability, because, you know, it's just like an early stage startup versus a late stage company. An early stage startup, things aren't fully pinned down. You're still flexible. You're s…”
Verdon: Multi-year regulatory cycles are too slow for AI progress
“AI is moving on a timescale of month to month, week to week, and, you know, regulations are on a few-year timescale at best put together, and that's just too slow of a feedback loop, and it's too heavy-handed, and it's probably not the way forward.”
Verdon: Incumbents use fearmongering to consolidate power and entrench dominance
“Fear mongering becomes instrumental towards certain people and incumbents that are trying to gather power and crystallize their position before, you know people realize that actually the future wasn't going to be a gloom and act actually what is going to be gr…”
Oyerinde: Quality and completion are community college's real problems, not cost
“So yeah, cost isn't really the problem with community college. The major, like, problem with community college, I sort of describe in two ways. It's like quality and completion, which is kind of a child or derivative of quality.”
Lonsdale: Large education and healthcare institutions prioritize self-preservation as employers
“Once you become a large employer in a state, like you actually end up existing sometimes for your own sake as a large employer. That's very powerful. This is why you have the really powerful healthcare interests and education interests. Like it's, you know, I …”
McAfee: Nothing improves the human condition more than technological progress
“I think in general,
When we analyze these very powerful technologies, we conclude that nothing improves the human condition and the state of nature more than technological progress.”
McAfee: True Ownership Means Less Cross-Functional Coordination and Hierarchy
“It's also, in some sense, the opposite of cross-functional coordination and process and structure and hierarchy. Now, I'm not saying that ownership equals chaos or equals anarchy, but it involves a lot less of all of those things than we became fond of in the …”
Slat: Climate change is a product of inferior technology
“Climate change, CO two is, is definitely a product of inferior technology. And we, you know, I truly believe that through, you know, innovation and you know, new, better technology, we can Live lives that are even more prosperous than today, while at the same …”
Miller: Outperformance requires unique info, unique access, insight, or luck
“I think there's really only four ways to outperform. You need to have a unique, unique information, unique access, unique insight, or have luck.”
McGrew: GPT-3 and GPT-4 must be prompted to act smart or dumb
“Well, that's actually one of the cool things that we've discovered with GPT-III and GPT-IV, Is that the model, so the models are trained on the internet and they're reading everything, right? Then they try to act like what they've seen, right? They're predicti…”
McGrew: Recent AI progress is just a series of engineering tricks
“Like the difference between neural networks and linear regression was really big. And the difference between neural networks now and neural networks two years ago is just a sequence series of tricks.”
McGrew: AI bias mitigation should prioritize workplace professionalism over political correctness
“And so I think a lot of, like near-term safety, a lot of these discussions about bias, like they really are about the fact that the model has learned all of these things, which it's learned a lot of true facts, it's learned a lot of things that are inaccurate,…”
Andreessen: Capitalists maximize wealth by distributing technology, not hoarding it
“The way that capitalists maximize their wealth is not by hoarding a new technology, it's by selling it to everybody.”
Andreessen: Clusters of high trait openness inevitably lean far-left politically
“Any time you have a clustering of people who are high in openness, inevitably they're on the political left and usually very far to the political left.”
Lonsdale: Raising excessive capital breaks startup cultures
“Mark's convinced me over the years not to raise insane amounts of money because it breaks cultures. I didn't agree with him 10 years ago. I've now seen it enough times. I know he's right, embarrassingly.”
Alex Karp: Silicon Valley investors dismiss founders who aren't overtly aggressive
“One of the things that entrepreneurs or builders need to understand about the valley is if you're not overtly aggressive about Representing yourself. They'll just assume that, you know, you're, it's not real.”
Karp: Effective enterprise software is American-built, productized, and commercially sold
“Almost all enterprise software that works in America, or in the world, has two characteristics. It's built in America, and it's built as a product. Yeah. And it has a third characteristic, quite frankly, that it's sold commercially.”
Alex Karp: Governments must buy technology from unlikable, non-conforming founders
“The future of the West depends on buying things from people that are Sometimes, not always, outside the norm, unlikable to you, are not going to conform to your thing, are not going to do the right dinners.”
Lonsdale: Claiming the rich steal discourages honest entrepreneurship
“That's really interesting because it's something that really bothers me as an entrepreneur is when everyone thinks rich people must be stealing or taking things.
Cause I think that what it does is it discarges people from being honest, hardworking entrepreneu…”
Rauch: Consuming energy on political debates accomplishes little and wastes potential
“I see patterns of, like, you're getting consumed in this political nonsense. You're spending so much energy. You think it's the most important thing in your life. It's not, and you're probably not really making a difference. You're just, like, getting yourself…”
Gee: Lack of surgical outcome data leaves patients completely in the dark
“The only people who know how good the surgeon is truly are, well, either you have a national data set showing outcomes, which we don't, except for a few small things. So, but you, but the people who operate with that guy or gal know how good they are, but that…”
Gee: For-profit companies solve social problems better than nonprofits because they scale
“And I say to them, Because it scales. You fix stuff. And when you make money, it grows, right?”
Berlia: India's addressable market for value products caps at 40 million
“These are people that if you're creating a value-added product, Beyond bottom of the pyramid, you have an addressable, easy market around about forty million. After forty million, you start to hit price points, which have to be very, very good, and, you know, …”
Lonsdale: Government expansion incentivizes large corporations to adopt state politics
“When we have areas where the government is growing, is regulating more, is getting more powerful, you see certain corporations start to have the same politics as those people in government. And when you say, oh, these world corporations, what are they doing? B…”
Davidson: 'Build it and they will come' is false for startups
“One of the adages of Silicon Valley that I hear really often is build it and they'll come, right? It's this belief that if the product is good enough, people will find it on their own, they'll download it, they'll pay it, and the company will be successful. An…”
Mintz: Legacy defense primes offer great early-career multidisciplinary training
“I would say it's a great place to start your career. You spend the first five years there, especially if you don't just stay on one program, you get into a development environment, you work on a few different things and see a few different disciplines. The, th…”
Mintz: Big defense contractors punish downside while offering zero upside for innovation
“That's the underlying problem is that in big companies like that, you own none of the success, and you pay for all of the downside risk. So there's really no incentive for you to take a risk, whereas in startups, it's the inverse.”
Lonsdale: Managing top talent requires accepting dissent and unruly behavior
“When I deal with very top talent, you have to be deal with, you have to be okay with dissent. You have to be okay with people being maybe quirky and difficult to manage and Unruly and telling you you're an idiot and all this stuff because the best people are j…”
Attia: Meditation is not as essential as exercise, nutrition, or sleep
“I don't think meditation per se is essential in the way that I would say exercise is essential and reasonable nutrition And adequate sleep are essential.”
Attia: Rising obesity is driven by a worse environment, not declining willpower
“I don't think that 40 years ago people had that much more willpower than they do today. I just think that the environment has gotten so much worse that you would need more willpower today to fight the gravitational pull Of this environment.”
Lonsdale: The most damaging disinformation is top-down mandates suppressing conversation
“The damaging one to me is when there's a top-down thing that's wrong, that's stopping a conversation.”
Attia: The fundamental flaw in US healthcare is lacking skin in the game
“So it's like when you don't bear the cost, when you don't have skin in the game, it doesn't matter. And that's the fundamental issue with the US healthcare system. Nobody has any skin in the game. Nobody has any skin in the game.”
Abraham Accords succeeded by prioritizing defense and economics over the Palestinian conflict
“Economic prosperity is what drives so many people today, especially in the region, especially where we've come from and they've come from. And this was approached really from the perspective of defense. There was a lot of stuff that went on behind the scenes a…”