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
Tan: Current AI systems have zero agency and resemble smart toasters
“As of today, you know, these systems are, it's just matrix math, and there is no agency yet.
[3400] Garry Tan: Like, there's basically, they're equivalent to incredibly smart toasters”
Garry Tan: Modern school systems are designed to strip children of agency
“We send them to a school system that is not designed for agency. It is literally designed to take agency away from our children.”
Garry Tan: Elon Musk proved Twitter didn't need 80% of its staff
“Elon came in and quickly asked, like, 80 or 90% of the people, and it turns out you didn't need 80 or 90% of the people, so.”
Poilievre: Liberal re-election will drive investment to US and halt pipeline construction
“I think if we go, if the liberals are reelected, you will see a continued outpour of investment to the United States. You will see that we do not build LNG plants, pipelines, or any other self-reliance projects that will break our dependence on America.”
Poilievre: The World Economic Forum Promotes Top-Down Technocratic Control
“I just think it it's an organization that has a very top-down mentality. I don't believe in top-down. I don't believe that there's this sort of group of globetrotting experts that can tell us how to live our lives, that can, you know, who can tell us which ind…”
Poilievre: Media Subsidies Interfere With Objective Political Reporting
“I think it makes it very difficult for media to make a judgment without keeping the back of their head which politician is going to pay the biggest subsidy.”
Codie Sanchez argues that remote work making people happier is a lie
“Some of the research shows, one, higher levels of depression and anxiety with work from home. So I actually think that was a great lie. It was a big, beautiful lie. That sitting in our sweatpants, in our house, on Zoom meetings all day would actually make us h…”
Holiday: Elon Musk's ventures relied on massive government subsidies
“Elon Musk sees himself as this groundbreaking, you know, Precedent shattering entrepreneur. And another version to look at is this guy who took massive government subsidies at critical points that allowed him to do those things.”
John Bragg: Entrepreneurs must work 70 hours a week, not 50
“That's the hours entrepreneurs have to work every week. Not 50, but 70. And entrepreneurs do work 70.”
Housel: George Carlin understood psychology better than Daniel Kahneman
“George Carlin understood psychology. I think better than Daniel Kahneman did. That's a bold statement, but I think that is actually true.”
Diagnosing Ordinary Misbehavior Strips Children of Their Agency
“We would pathologize ordinary behaviors and treat them to see themselves as disordered. Oh, that's just, you know, you have ADHD. Oh, that's your oppositional defiance disorder. That's why you acted out. So instead of using the sort of lay terms we've always u…”
Gen Z Workers Will Complain to HR If Their Feelings Are Hurt
“And we're seeing even as, you know, the young, this young rising generation goes off to the workplace, if you, if their feelings are hurt at the workplace, they will complain to HR and try to get their boss fired. That seems to them a reasonable response To so…”
Prompting Children to Ruminate on Their Trauma Sabotages Their Resilience
“Instead, we tell the kids the opposite. Your parents are divorced. You've had trauma. Let's talk about it. It's the worst thing we could do for a kid who'd been through something hard.”
Exercise and Dancing Outperform Psychotherapy for Treating Mild to Moderate Depression
“And the reason is, is they've measured things. You know what better for mood, for mild to moderate depression than psychotherapy or antidepressants? Dancing. Yeah. Exercise. Dancing.”
School Psychology Associations Stayed Silent on Foreseeable Lockdown Damage to Children
“The school counselors association, school psychologists association, none of these organizations had anything to say about the foreseeable damage that was going to happen to kids.”
The Only True Parenting Experts Are Those Who Raised Reliable Adults
“In my book, those are the only parenting experts. The ones who've actually done a good job of it.”
Rey Flemings: Modern society would label Adam Smith a socialist or communist
“The capitalism that Adam Smith articulated in Wealth of Nations is not the capitalism that we practice today. Nowhere near it. In fact by today's definition, Adam Smith would be labeled a socialist or a communist if you actually read Adam Smith's quotes in the…”
Gurner: Leaders Should Not Bring Their Full Selves to Work
“And sometimes stepping into that role means that you leave a lot of other things on the side. It means that you don't bring your full self to work. Nobody cares. Nobody wants that. And like you bring your best work self to work and you lead from the front and …”
Holiday: Trump's effectiveness relies on disorienting opponents rather than strategic genius
“What Trump does is I don't think it's so much a function of genius on his part, so much as a confluence of personality traits, so enrages his opponents and disorients them, and is so the opposite of what they have experienced dealing with, that it's almost lik…”
Dr. Julie Gurner rejects 'building in public' in favor of private execution
“I know everyone's a big fan of, like, building in public, and I'm not, I'm absolutely opposite of that, and I'm much more of the Sun Tzu, like, let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you fall, fall like a thunderbolt, right?”
Gupta: Eliminating Advanced Tracks for Equality Mistreats High-Performing Individuals
“Well, I think it's also to your point, Shane, you know, even when people say equality, it really is mistreating the kid that's better at something. Why do they not get to be challenged? If you really think about it, why do they not get to enjoy school anymore?…”
Parrish: No One Can Be the World's Best and Remain Well-Balanced
“I don't believe you can be the best in the world at anything and be a well-balanced person.”
The space colonization drive is an imperialist holdover, not a necessity
“In terms of a need to, like, colonize the solar system, I don't think, I think people believe that that's an imperative as a holdover from the ideas of the age of imperialism when we thought, oh yes, we have to go conquer and colonize the whole world.”
Matthew Walker's 'Why We Sleep' promotes anxiety and makes false claims
“There's a book, which initially I thought was good, called Why We Sleep, which is actually very bad from everything I now know. I mean, it's not that the book is, Incorrect. In the macro sense. But it gives you it, it, I think the book itself is anxiety induci…”
Shah: Hinduism cannot scale globally because it lacks standardization
“Hinduism is an, I would say, not as scalable as, let's say, many of the other religions, because it's not standardized. There is no one book, no 10 rules, no one God. So what do you really scale? It's an open source religion which people make and built on some…”
Shah: Fandom signals that a person is extremely easy to offend
“In fact, I believe that all the people who demonstrate the need to be fans are the people who are easiest to offend, ah, in life. I think being fan or having favorites is telling the world that you're extremely easy to offend.”
Balaji: Heavy-handed state crackdowns signal government insecurity, not strength
“This crackdown demonstrated insecurity. When you need to do something like that it indicates that you feel you can't just, you know, go and put out a megaphone and be like, hey, people, I'm listening to you know, we'll figure it out, and there's a mutual trust…”
Elites lose trust after repeated intelligence and COVID failures
“Frankly elites don't deserve a lot of trust, you know, because they've messed up so many other things, you know, Like from the, you know, the Afghanistan intelligence, the Iraq intelligence to lots of the early official misinformation on COVID.”
Srinivasan: Woke ideology cannot win in pseudonymous crypto environments
“That army of wokeness, that ideology can win on like, you know, centralized social media platforms, English internet. But once you start going pseudonymous, once you start having cryptocurrency involved, once you start Going international and having people abr…”
Balaji Srinivasan: Chennai is cleaner than San Francisco
“Chennai is cleaner than San Francisco. It's not close. Okay. Like I, there's no question.”
Andreessen argues that US K-12 education operates as a Soviet-style monopoly
“K through 12 is a monopoly, right? It's a government-sponsored and run monopoly, and so, of course, it's gonna, you know, it's a Soviet system, right? It's gonna, it's run exactly the same way education was run in the Soviet Union. Of course, it's gonna genera…”
Eyal: All human motivation is driven solely by escaping discomfort
“Human motivation is not about carrots and sticks. It's not about pain and pleasure, but rather it's just about one thing. All human behavior is spurred by the desire to escape discomfort. Everything we do for just one reason, the desire to escape discomfort, e…”
Rushkoff: Most Social Media Replies Aim to Hurt, Diminish Autonomy, Distort Reality
“The vast majority of people replying to you, and looking at you, and using the information you're putting out, are using it to hurt you. To reduce your autonomy. To make you feel bad about yourself. To create mental illnesses. To distort your perception of rea…”
Conant: Most companies no longer report quarterly earnings
“Most people aren't reporting quarterly earnings. They're doing annual, they provide guidance, but they're looking more long-term in nature, which is appropriate.”
Eyal: 'The Social Dilemma' is sloppy to the point of negligence
“My take on it is that it's equivalent of if Steven Spielberg called Jaws a documentary.
It's you really have to see it.
It's so, it's sloppy to the point of negligence.
It's so silly.”
McGonigal: Traditional Schooling Damaged Children's Mental Well-Being and Motivation
“We've done long-term damage to kids' mental wellbeing and their, you know, brain's ability to, I don't know, generate self-motivate, you know, outside of these external pressures.”
McGonigal: People Must Trust Expert Systems Rather Than Rely On Intuition
“We probably shouldn't think for ourselves is, is part of the problem. I mean, we do, we need to have trust. There needs to be trust in some expert or external system. I mean, if you're always just sort of trusting what you think, your brain is going to get you…”
Cubitt: Husband-and-wife founding teams rarely work out in venture-backed startups
“Rarely do husband-wife teams work out for a number of reasons, but not least of which, in our view anyway, you know, let's say that the wife is the CEO and the husband is the CTO or the CFO, You know, their direct reports are rarely gonna, you know, not gonna …”
Chamath: Deflationary super cycle started when US ended Apollo program
“In many ways, you know, that this deflationary super cycle really started in 1970 when we basically ended the space program in the early version that saw us get to the moon.”
Holland: The cybersecurity industry is an unethical shit show
“The current state of the cybersecurity industry, to say it's a hard problem is an understatement. It is a, an unethical shit show, I would say, and it really bothers me where it's at.”
Holland: NSO Group cannot be trusted to make ethical decisions
“They have a whole group now or whole internal group within the company that I've read dedicated to making sure they make ethical decisions. I don't, Personally trust that they're making ethical decisions.”
Holland vehemently opposes any pardon for Edward Snowden
“A little part of me will die if he is pardoned.”
McLean: Stock performance does not rationally prove Elon Musk is a genius
“In the Tesla debate, one of the main things Tesla bulls say is, look at the stock. So, because the stock has done so well, that proves that Elon Musk is a genius and that our belief is, is right. I mean, obviously, it proves nothing of the sort, right? It's a …”
The elementary education system functions largely as organized daycare
“The education system, at least in elementary school is largely just organized daycare.”
Calacanis: Hanging Investment Decisions on Market Size Is Cowardice
“So you have to, I think, if you're going to be great at this, not try to be a coward and hang your hat on the market size. I think that's what cowards do.”
Scott Adams Says Bosses Refused to Promote Him for Being White
“My bosses, in both cases, they called me in and said, you know, we can't really promote white males anymore. Because we don't have enough diversity, and we just got in trouble.”