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
Duke: Institutional investors underperform random selling by 70 basis points
“When you look at their sell side decisions, they're usually about 70 bips worse than the benchmark.
So if you were to just randomly
Free the capital up from your portfolio.
How would you do?
That's the benchmark.
When you look at their actual decisions, and th…”
Duke: Institutional investors beat beta by 100 to 120 bps on buys
“So when you look at expert investors on the buy side,
They're doing really well.
They're generally doing somewhere around like a hundred, a 120 bips or so better than the beta.”
Duke: NBA draft order predicts playing time independently of player skill
“Draft order was predictive. Independent of the skill of the player, for how much playing time the player got, and for how long their contract was.”
Duke: 2021 report estimated California bullet train cost at $120B
“The last report that came out, which was just this last year, now estimates the cost at about a hundred and twenty billion. And still says, like, it's very uncertain that we're going to actually be able to conquer these engineering challenges.”
Duke: People Spend 6–7 Work Weeks Yearly Choosing Food, Clothes, and Shows
“The interesting thing about what to eat in a restaurant, what to wear, what to watch on Netflix, is that I think if you add just those three things together, I think it's something like between six and seven work weeks that we spend per year on those decisions…”
Duke: US schools pushed probability math from kindergarten to eighth grade
“So when you look at the curriculum for most K through 12 in 1980, starting in kindergarten, you were learning probability. And now the first point at which probability is introduced in the math curriculum in the United States is in eighth grade.”
Duke: Most mountaineering fatalities occur during the descent
“And most of the dangers are on the descent. That's when most people die is coming back down where you're tired and you don't have as much adrenaline and obviously your oxygen is low.”
Duke: Sears once represented one percent of total US GNP
“At one point, they represented one percent of the total GNP of the United States.”
Duke: Harvard Study Showed Hand-Raising Artificially Created Supermajorities
“What they found with the group that was raising their hands in class was that super majorities formed very quickly. In other words, consensus formed. Once people sort of saw consensus start to form, people were sort of going with the consensus. I think partly …”