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 22 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
Véliz: Academia faces a serious problem with data fraud
“In my world, in academia, I think we have a serious problem of fraud. Of people who are very well known, and who have been very successful, and who have fudged their data, or who have committed other kinds of academic fraud.”
Véliz: Large language models have no regard for truth
“And that's essentially what a large language model is. It has no regard for the truth. It wants to please you. If what pleases you happens to be true, great. But if it's not true, then it doesn't care one way or another.”
Véliz: Predictive AI creates self-fulfilling prophecies with zero error signals
“Self-fulfilling prophecies are like the perfect crime. Because it's like a murder weapon that disappears upon striking. It leaves no record. It creates no error signals. We will never know how that person would have fared, because they will never get the job, …”
Véliz: Algorithmic bias audits are limited by a lack of counterfactual data
“When you say, well, let's investigate for bias or investigate for inaccuracy, there is a limit to what we can do, because we will never have the counterfactual. This is not a randomized control trial, right? And you still have the problem that without clear cr…”
Véliz: Opaque algorithmic systems induce alienation and magical thinking
“We are building systems that are very Kafkaesque, that are impossible to navigate, and I don't know if you've had this experience in which they are becoming so alienating and so Kafkaesque That people start having, like, magical thinking about the algorithm, a…”
Véliz: Anonymous Wallets Made $1.2M Betting on Iran Attack
“Six anonymous accounts earned 1.2 million dollars on a prediction market betting for the attack on Iran, and some of those wallets were funded hours before, which suggests that they might have had insider information, and if they had insider information, did t…”
Véliz: Algorithmic hiring filters cause employers to lose key talent
“Society wants that talent. We're missing out on important talent when we streamline everything.”
Véliz: Predictive lending models are uncontestable and shroud injustice
“And I reject your application on the basis of a prediction. There's no way you can contest that, because predictions are not facts. At best, they're educated guesses. And because they're not facts, you cannot prove it to be false. And so, it's a way to shroud …”
Véliz: The Markup found mortgage algorithms denied Black applicants with identical profiles
“The markup had a very long story a few years ago about how two people who had applied for a mortgage had been denied, and when the markup investigated, their file looked exactly the same or very similar to other two people who happened to be white, and they, a…”
Véliz: Mass surveillance leads to authoritarianism and a police state
“The price to pay for survey, for mass surveillance, is a police state. It leads to authoritarianism, and so often we're willing to surrender our privacy on promises that are never kept, that are very problematic, even if they could keep it, and we're sort of s…”
Véliz: The safest countries globally are not the most surveilled
“The safest countries in the world are not the most surveilled ones. So Spain is one example. It has some of the lower statistics for any kind of crime, including homicide and so on, violent crimes. And it's not better surveilled Than the US or the UK. And in f…”
Véliz: Facial recognition surveillance erodes protest anonymity vital to democracy
“When you have a protest, and in particular, a peaceful protest, It's very important to have anonymity. That is one of the bedrocks of democracy, and when you have cameras all over the place, and now with facial recognition being so easy to use, you are eroding…”
Véliz: Surveillance machinery exists primarily to feed predictive AI systems
“Surveillance is important because the whole machinery of surveillance is there to feed the machinery of prediction. So these two machineries are intimately related, and that's why it matters.”
Véliz: Probabilistic justice allows bad actors to evade accountability easily
“When we make the justice system about probabilities, we're losing its principled approach. And so you make it very easy for the bad guys to get away with it, because you don't have to make it impossible for people to challenge you, or even very hard. You just …”
Véliz: People posting under real identities online are actually more aggressive
“Even though it's very intuitive to think that way, when you look at the empirical data, it shows that people who are identified online tend to be more aggressive, and then they tend to be more followed and more successful in that aggression.”
Véliz: HBR study shows AI makes workers less productive
“There was a paper recently at the Harvard Business Review that suggested that even when people think they're being more productive with AI, when you have researchers look at it, they're being less productive because they're spending a lot of time fixing what t…”
Véliz: Politicians Bet on Themselves to Manipulate Prediction Markets
“If you want to influence public perception and you have enough money, you can bet heavily on something or someone to make it look more popular, and we already have examples of politicians betting on themselves.”
Véliz: Prediction Markets Provide No Productive Capital Unlike Stock Markets
“The stock market, when you invest in a company, you're actually contributing capital to that company in a way that is an important contribution to society. Whereas the prediction market is just a bet.”
Véliz: The most impactful personal, business, and societal events are least predictable
“The most important events in your life, in your personal life, but also in your business life and in our lives as a society are the ones that are the most unpredictable.”
Véliz: Predictive algorithms are actively used for sentencing in justice systems
“No, but we're using predictive algorithms in the justice system for sentencing, for many aspects in the justice system, and for the reasons that we explored with insurance, or with loans, or with jobs, that's very problematic.”
Véliz: Algorithmic Selection Would Have Rejected Seinfeld
“So if we had had algorithms back then selecting what people want to watch, Seinfeld would have not been one of those cases.”
Véliz: Google Flu Trends failed because search query data was too noisy
“When Google tried to predict flus and pandemic type events it tried for years and years and years, it increased the complexity, it increased the data, and it could never do it, and eventually it shut down.
Partly because it was relying on people's searches,
Pe…”