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 39 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 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
Andreessen: Universities and employers hire African immigrants over African Americans
“Both the universities and the corporate employers are literally, this is true. They're literally, they literally import Africans so that they don't have to hire African Americans. Because they still count as black.”
Andreessen: Western cities form top-plus-bottom political coalitions, ejecting the middle class
“What happens is from a political standpoint is the cities that are run right there in, in, in, in their local democracies, it's these super high end kind of, you know, very progressive elites. And then it's sort of the clientele underclass. Right. That you kno…”
Andreessen: General-purpose robotics will scale massively over the next decade
“These human robots, like the general purpose robotics thing is going to happen, and it's going to happen in the next decade, and it's going to happen at giant scale, and I think there's a plausible argument, which Elon also believes, that robotics is going to …”
Andreessen: US explicitly chose de-industrialization by making industrial activity illegal
“We chose to de-industrialize through a set of explicit policy choices, you know, not, not least of which is You know, we made a lot of industrial activity illegal over time.”
Andreessen: European regulation has made AI effectively illegal, causing brain drain
“And then, by the way, the US is benefiting a lot, because Europe has basically made AI illegal. Like, they're regulating themselves to death. And so, the smart AI people in Europe are moving to the US.”
Andreessen: Smart kids from rural America cannot get into elite universities
“If you're a family, you know, if you, if you're a family, if you're parents of a kid where I grew up and you've got a smart kid and you think you're gonna get them into, you know, a top university in this country, like, you are fooling yourself. Like, there is…”
Andreessen: Halting nuclear power in Europe enabled Russia to invade Ukraine
“The consequences of stopping nuclear power 50 years later, you know, it's just been, it was just like a catastrophic mistake. You know, geopolitically, it's directly connected to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Europe is effectively funding Russia to invade Ukra…”
Andreessen: Applying precautionary principle to AI would be catastrophic mistake
“There's now an attempt to apply that, that, that, that ethos or that rule for AI, which I think would be another catastrophic mistake.”
Andreessen: Key economic sectors have stagnated or regressed over past 50 years
“Like we we've been in this 50 year period of actually very low productivity growth and very low technological change throughout our society. Which is sort of the opposite of what a lot of people think they've experienced, but like just practically speaking, mo…”
Andreessen: Most of the US economy operates as cartels protecting incumbency
“Like most of the economy is, is one form of cartel or another. Like, as far as I can tell, it's like, you've got the education cartel, you've got the healthcare cartel, you've got the banking cartel. And then you've got, you know, you've got cartels of workers…”
Andreessen: The AI existential risk debate is a moral panic
“This can only be happening because we're in a moral panic right now but like, let's say, rationality has left the room for the time being”
Andreessen: AI extinction risk theories are completely unscientific
“It's a completely unscientific position. By definition, it's a completely unscientific position because there is no way at all to prove or disprove the theory. Right. And so it is the worst kind of ivory tower thought experiment.”
Andreessen: China threat is needed to align US tech and government policy
“As long as China's a big enough threat, it will be sufficient to kind of glue us together to be able to actually make some rational decisions as a society. You know, maybe the presence of an external enemy is actually helpful to kind of galvanize, you know, ki…”
Andreessen: Superintelligence leads to creation and exploration, not malice
“Once you're at, like, super genius level, like, I don't know, maybe there's a handful of, like, real life, like, Luthers in the world, but, like, once you're at super genius level, like, you have better things to do than, like, go around and try to kill a bunc…”
Andreessen: Current illiberalism is liberalism taken to its logical extreme
“I don't think what's happening now is a betrayal of liberalism. I think it's just the full realization of liberalism. Like, I think it's what happens when you take liberalism to the extreme, which is you declare war on the intolerant, right?”
Andreessen: Tech insiders are lobbying Washington for destructive AI regulations
“A lot of the people I am opposing, at least rhetorically on these AI issues are actually people in the tech industry who are showing up in Washington asking for various kinds of things that I think would be, you know, horrifically destructive.”
Andreessen: AI alignment has fundamentally become social engineering and politics
“And for that second risk expressed as AI alignment, what you're dealing with fundamentally is social engineering. And when you're dealing with social engineering, you're necessarily dealing with politics.”
Andreessen: China and Modern Industrial Powers Followed the American System Playbook
“In the 20th century, basically every industrial revolution in every other country that has worked in the last hundred years basically follows that model as well, so. You know, it's the same thing Germany did. It's the same thing Japan did. It's the same thing …”
Andreessen: Slow growth causes populism by fostering zero-sum competition
“The way that you get populism is slow growth, right? Because you, because slow growth puts everybody in the mind of zero sum, right? Everything becomes a zero sum. You know, kind of fight for resources because people don't think that there's a lot of opportuni…”
Andreessen: Knowledge-work economies concentrate urban wealth and squeeze out the middle class
“If you're gonna replant your, the sort of commanding heights of your economy on knowledge work, then what you're gonna do is you're gonna slam basically all economic growth into the cities, right? Because you're, which is what Silicon Valley has done, right? S…”
Andreessen purchased four times Manhattan's acreage for a new Solano County city
“We have a project to build a new city in California. We've bought, you know, four times the acreage of Manhattan in Solano County.”
Andreessen: US healthcare is on track to reach 50% of GDP
“Healthcare is 20% of the economy on its way to 50%.”
Andreessen: LASIK prices collapsed because it operates outside the regulated system
“There's one area of healthcare that is incredibly sophisticated, technologically advanced, and the price curve looks like Moore's law. The price curve looks like video games. The price curve is just a straight line down, and the quality of the service has gone…”
Andreessen: Paying people not to work is a catastrophic mistake
“I think it's a bad idea to pay people to not work. I think we're running an experiment in this country right now to pay a lot of people not to work, and, you know, it's sort of a big catastrophic mistake.”
Andreessen: AIs will not get certified as doctors or lawyers anytime soon
“And my, the point in that essay is what Joe just said, which is like, it will be illegal to do that. Like, it's not going to happen because it's going to be illegal. Like AIs are not going to get certified as doctors and lawyers anytime soon. Like that, that I…”
Andreessen: Europe fell from ~15 of top 50 tech firms to just Spotify
“25 years ago, if you did a list of the 50 biggest tech companies in the world, like a pretty significant number of them were European. It's like, I don't know, probably 15 of the top 50 or something. You know, today you're basically down to Spotify which is gr…”
Andreessen: Only a lethal real-world incident will prove existential AI risk
“And so you know, the minute one of these things tries to take out, you know you know, one of these AI risk people, you know, develops a, you know, custom unique pathogen and, you know, somebody drops dead in the street and it turns out a rogue AI did it. Like …”
Andreessen: AI will favor defense over offense and reduce violence
“Arguably this swings AI swings very much the advantage of the defender over the attacker, and I think maybe we're already seeing that play out in Ukraine... My guess is this tilts in the direction of defense and therefore in the direction of probably actually …”
Andreessen: Seattle tech executives' district elected a councilwoman seeking to nationalize them
“The district in Seattle, the city council district where the most Microsoft and Amazon executives lived, live elected a city council woman who's, who ran a platform of nationalizing Microsoft and Amazon.”
Andreessen: Nixon's nuclear plan would have accelerated electric cars by 30-40 years
“It would, by the way, it would have gotten us to electric cars, you know, probably 3040 years faster. And would have completely separated us from strategic involvement in the, in, in the Middle East for energy.”
Andreessen: Nixon's EPA and NRC prevented nuclear Project Independence from happening
“The bad news is he created the EPA and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which then prevented Project Independence from happening. And of course, the no new nuclear power plants got built, but that was a policy choice, right?”
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.”
Andreessen: AI will revive far-left dreams of central economic planning
“AI is like gonna create a whole new set of dreams of state power, and like I said, the Chinese have one version of that, but, you know, on the far left even in the US, you have this idea the, there's a book called Fully Automated Luxury Communism which is this…”
Andreessen: US economic and productivity growth permanently downshifted around 1971
“Around 1971, basically the U.S. Economy permanently downshifted its growth rate. And both in terms of productivity growth, which of course measures technological transformation in the economy as well as economic growth.”
Andreessen: Ezra Klein's book 'Abundance' is 'really good'
“There's this new book out called abundance from Ezra Klein, who I would say I disagree with on approximately zero of everything. But I think this book is really good.”
Andreessen: Technology is the source of practically all economic growth
“Productivity growth is the source of effectively all economic growth. And so therefore technology is the source of practically all economic growth. And that's been the case for hundreds of years.”
Andreessen: AI should liberate humans to focus on uniquely human fulfillment
“Increased technology and a particular AI should basically actually make it possible to be more human. You should be able to spend more of your life doing things that are human in, in their nature and human in the sense of fulfillment, as opposed to doing the t…”