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 355 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
Markham: Children face higher abuse risks when an unrelated male moves in
“When a new man comes on the scene in a child's life, a new man is now with their mother, their risk of being abused or in fact being killed in childhood goes up.”
Wolfe: Childless CEOs over 50 tend to be overly controlling operators
“I have a really politically incorrect one, which is older CEOs that by choice, not biologically, because there's a big difference, never had children. I find that for whatever reason, they tend to be very controlling. Now, my sample size here is like five of f…”
AI Will Exponentially Exceed Human Intelligence in Hours in New Domains
“Now imagine that computer is unleashed not in the domain of chess, but in other domains. It'll totally recreate everything we know and then go beyond it in hours. So the scary thing with AI is this, that it will become exponentially smarter than we are in minu…”
Robinson: Palo Alto Has the Highest Teenage Suicide Rate in the US
“Of all the cities in the United States, the one with the highest teenage suicide rate is Palo Alto, which is tax central, right?”
Robinson: Parental Birthplace Eliminated Racial Differences in Test Score Gains
“If your father was born in another country, and your mother was born in the United States, that student improved the same regardless of race. Race dropped out as a factor.”
Gawande: Spinal surgery for pain provides no average benefit at nine months
“In, ah, back surgery, we have a bunch of studies showing that when you do back surgery for pain, spinal, spinal surgery for pain as opposed for, as opposed to for neurological symptoms where you have actual nerve damage. But when it's for pain, the average peo…”
Cowen: Most of Eastern Europe is depopulating and will never catch up
“Parts of the world, such as Eastern Europe you know, Poland maybe is catching up to the West, but most of it is being depopulated and emptying out. And it basically will never catch up.”
Greene: Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs was rushed and shallow.
“You know, I like Walter Isaacson. I think he's a very fine biographer, but You know, even like the Steve jobs that he's rushed, he's got to write it because she just died. And like, I don't really feel like when I read that book, I understand the man, Steve jo…”
Collison: Tech workers moving to low-cost regions will be less productive
“Because of the sort of the collision of ideas and people in cities makes them more productive than if they were elsewhere. If you believe that to be the case, and there's like pretty good empirical data that it is, then it, you can't just move elsewhere. You c…”
Oakley: Research Shows Visual and Auditory Learning Styles Are Scientifically Groundless
“There was a excellent study done by a woman named Beth Rogoski and what she did was she took one of the standard tests to kind of analyze a very widely used test that is used to distinguish an individual as to whether they're a visual learner or an auditory le…”
Chris Voss: 'Getting to Yes' fails because humans make decisions emotionally
“Getting to yes is intellectually sound. There's nothing intellectually to be challenged on getting to yes. And unfortunately, that does you no good as soon as you involve human beings because none of us are intellectually sound.”
Chris Voss: BATNA is a horrible negotiation strategy that leaves money on the table
“An intellectually brilliant idea in practice, a horrible idea... Here's, here's the problem with Batman. That becomes your goal, and so therefore, if you say to yourself, and the vast majority of people who calculate their BATNA, you know, as long as I do bett…”
Nutrition Research Lowered Its Standards Due to the Difficulty of Human Trials
“Very difficult, if not impossible, to do right, and so what the nutrition and public health research communities did is they just lowered their standards for what they would consider reliable knowledge, and this just became sort of, ah, inculcated throughout t…”
The Medical Community Has No Idea How to Solve the Obesity Epidemic
“And, you know, we end up in a situation today where we have, you know, these massive, unprecedented epidemics of obesity and diabetes and related diseases, and the medical public health community has no idea, almost literally no idea what to do about it, and e…”
Explaining Obesity With Calories Is Like Explaining Wealth With Dollars
“This idea that excess calories is what makes us fat, Is the, and I, I'm embarrassed that I ever, never thought of this before. It's logically equivalent to saying, you know, excess money makes us rich. Or I don't know, scoring excess points in a football game …”
Chronic Metabolic Disease Stems From Refined Foods, Not a Lack of Fiber
“You add fiber, you can slow down the digestion of the carbohydrates. You can even slow down the digestion of the sugars. So that would probably help, but you've paid attention to the wrong thing. It's not the absence of the fiber. It's the presence of those ot…”
Taubes Admits His Own Nutrition Science Initiative Did More Harm Than Good
“And if anything, at this point in time, we have done more harm than good.”
Type 2 Diabetes Is Reversible Without Drugs via Low-Carb Diets
“Even type two diabetes was irreversible. Once on insulin, always on insulin, basically, until you get taken down by the side effects. And now people are showing that on these diets, and maybe others as well, but they're showing that this is a reversible diseas…”
Computers will surpass humans at quality thinking long before intuition
“It'll be a long time before those intuitions and those imaginations are created by computers. Ok, but it won't be a long time before computers produce better quality thinking.”
Grant: Exact replications in social science are nearly impossible to achieve
“The odds that you're going to find the exact same effect with a different group of people who don't have an identical distribution of traits are pretty close to zero in my opinion.”
Sutherland: Economics is creatively limiting by reducing motivation to bribes and fines
“The problem of economics isn't only that it's wrong, it's that it's incredibly creatively limiting, because it tends to posit a very one-dimensional view of human motivation, and therefore, if you wish to change human behavior, the only two ways you can do it …”
Sutherland: Shareholder value short-termism creates psychopathic, untrusted businesses
“And I think the problem with the shareholder value movement, by the way, and short term targets in business, is you're creating in businesses with a focus on the short term, you're creating psychopathic businesses, you're creating businesses which consumers in…”
Ravikant: No one reaches enlightenment or does serious internal work in groups
“Nobody reaches enlightenment or internal happiness or does serious internal work in group settings. It is a very lonely kind of task. And so to some extent, I think that people who are constantly looking for social affirmation in their internal work, aren't th…”
Naval Ravikant dismisses macroeconomics as corrupted politics lacking scientific falsifiable predictions.
“Macroeconomics is a combination of voodoo complex systems and politics. And you can find macroeconomists to take every side of every argument. So I think that discipline, because it doesn't make falsifiable predictions, which is the hallmark of science, becaus…”
Naval Ravikant: Belief in the technological Singularity is a religion for nerds.
“I think it's religion for nerds. You know, it's got all the same characteristics. It's unfalsifiable until it happens. It basically says the chosen ones will be saved. The world's gonna end. You know, we will be immortal. It's very hard to tell apart from a
Ex…”
Naval: Humanity is no closer to general AI than 20 years ago
“We are no closer to creating a general AI. I think that we were 20 years ago.”
Domingos: Doctors Gatekeep Medical AI to Prevent Automating Their Own Jobs
“In the particular case of medicine, it's not used more already because, of course, the doctors are also the gatekeepers Of the system, and they're not very interested in replacing themselves or their job that they like best by machines.”
Domingos: AI Will Plateau Rather Than Experiencing Infinite Runaway Intelligence Growth
“And I think they will be in the case of AI, but I don't think we're going to see this, you know, infinite growth that, you know, goes completely beyond you know, what humans can imagine.”
Zweig: The best investors often possess an autistic-spectrum emotional detachment
“A lot of the best investors Have that sort of touch of something on the autistic spectrum. It's a little bit of detachment from other people's emotions that enables them to stand back and look and observe what other people are feeling and say, that's funny. Wh…”
Zweig: Venture capital valuations ramp up without properly accounting for dilution
“They set their own valuations, and there's also a disturbing wrinkle in that the valuations sort of as a new round of capital comes in that ramps up the valuation without accounting for dilution the same way you would in a public company. And I think that's ve…”
Jacobs: Kurzweil is probably right that human-technology merger will create new species
“Ray predicts a singularity whereby technology becomes more intelligent, more capable than humans, and we merge with technology, that we use so much technology in our own bodies, with wearables, and nanobots, and so forth, that, and AI, and outsourcing our memo…”
Nejatian: Turnarounds require violently changing defaults without change management
“You need to figure out which defaults are killing the company and change them violently. There must not be change management. Because you want the change to feel jarring.”
Nejatian: Companies die if they allow multiple internal cultures to exist
“Companies cannot have multiple cultures. They just can't. They just die. If you allow a company to have many different cultures, What you end up creating is you lose all short form of communication. And you end up spending a lot of time aligning people such th…”
Harik: The best professionals do not separate work from personal life
“I find the best professionals, you don't have a distinction between the two to a certain extent. Work is part of life, the same way that life is part of work. So effectively, it's a circle. You do these things in a very interchangeable way, whether you're spen…”
Liemandt: 90% of Students Using Academic Chatbots Are Cheating
“90% of kids who are using chatbots for academics are cheating and not learning.”
Poilievre: Taxpayer subsidies to foreign multinationals never produce promised jobs
“Giving money, taxpayer money, to foreign multinationals never ends up producing the promised jobs. They find a way to lawyer and lobby the money into their pockets with few conditions, and as soon as they get the cash, they dash.”
Publicly traded companies are incentivized to behave like psychopaths
“PLCs, or companies on the NASDAQ, or the, you know, stock exchange, are incentivized to behave like psychopaths, because they're optimized around short-term transactional value, not long-term relationship building.”
Sutherland: Tech-Driven Management Optimizes for Metrics Distant from Customer Needs
“When you allow tech bros too much power over decision-making, along with their running dog lackeys in kind of management consultancy, You're optimizing for something which may be very, very distant from what your real-world customers really care about.”
Parrish: Society progresses by having more outlier entrepreneurs like Elon Musk
“And the point of this is like, we need more people like Elon, not fewer in the world. Whether you agree with him or not, this is how society progresses. We need differences.”
Parrish: Political and social conflict is often fueled by envy, not principles
“Third, understand that much political and social conflict that appears to be about principles is actually driven by envy. The principles might be real, but the anger comes from envy.”
Donald Trump is the funniest U.S. president, which is an incredible communications hack
“He is the funniest president. I'm sorry, Trump is the funniest president. Reagan, close second. He is, and then Lyndon Johnson. He is legitimately funny, and being funny is an incredible communications hack. It gets people's attention. It makes them keep tunin…”
Evans: AI's impact equals the iPhone, not the Industrial Revolution
“It's funny, my, I suppose my take on AI, controversial take on AI, rather like my controversial take on crypto is being a centrist, in that it seems to me very clear this is like the biggest thing since the iPhone, but I also think it's only the biggest thing …”
Evans: Anthropic's safety studies merely prove models follow rogue prompts
“And that's what these anthropic studies are. They're basically, you tell the machine to say a thing, And then it says it. Like, well you haven't proved anything.”
Johnson: The craving for sexual novelty stems from severe emotional numbness
“You need novelty when you're numbed out and shut down. And you need more and more novel sensation to have you get turned on. That's the way I see it. Novelty is about how we've numbed our sexuality.”
Johnson: Therapy teaching couples to 'fight fair' is completely irrelevant rubbish
“And therapists focus on conflict, teach you how to fight fair, and fighting fair is rubbish, ok, it's like, it's irrelevant, it's, you know, it's, so, you know and we don't look at what's going on underneath, which is lack of emotional connection”
Micromanagement is just attention to detail unless the boss lacks judgment
“Like micromanagement and attention to detail, same, two words for the same thing, right? Attention to detail is great. Like your boss is involved in your stuff. Like that's only a problem if your boss is an idiot and out of touch and making bad decisions. But …”
Politicians have bought the press and now use media as tools
“Politicians. Used to fear the press and now to a large part, they bought it and use it as a tool.”
Gil: Crash data shows children only need car seats until age two
“If you actually look at crash data, Real data, and people have now reproduced this across multiple countries, multiple time periods, it's the age of two. So for six extra years, we keep people in booster seats and car seats, at least against the data, right?”