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 1,976 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 14 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
Children infer mindset from parents' reactions to mistakes, not abstract beliefs
“Kids tend to draw strong inferences from their parents' reactions to mistakes. So Kyla's work began with a very curious observation, which was that the correlation between kids' Parents' beliefs about the malleability of intelligence and their parents' beliefs…”
A 21-Minute Writing Intervention Halted the Downward Trend in Marital Satisfaction
“What that study showed was that there was an overall, a slow decline over time in marital quality. People, as time went by, felt less close, less intimate, less passionate, less satisfied in their marriages. And as I understand it, that's a common finding in l…”
Howey: Amazon halves self-publishing royalties outside the $2.99 to $9.99 range
“They think eBooks should be between two 99 and nine 99. And if you price it there, they'll give you a 70%. If you price it below two 99, Hey, you're welcome to do that. But they're going to pay you 35%, which is half. If you price it over nine 99, again, your …”
Johnson: Survey Data Shows People in Exclusive Relationships Report the Best Sex
“The people who have, report having the best sex, have it most often, are most satisfied with it, and find it most thrilling, are people in a long-term, stable, connected, exclusive relationship.”
Dr. Sue Johnson: Research Shows North America Is the Least-Touching Culture Globally
“Basically this lady did this research and said, we are the least touching culture anywhere on this planet in North America. We don't touch each other.”
Haidt: US teen suicide is up 25% for boys, 70% for girls
“The rates of self-harm, that is kids who are hospitalized because they cut themselves, that, that's for girls only. Boys are not changing on that. That goes way up in the same pattern, and then it's also suicide. The boys' suicide rate in the United States is …”
Haidt: Unsupervised outdoor play shifted from age 6 to ages 10–14
“And people who were born before 1982, the answer is always six plus or minus a year. We used to always let kids out outside with other kids at the age of six or seven, and then I ask just kids born after 1995, and the answer is usually between 10 and 14.”
Government Surveillance Relies Mostly on Commercial Corporate Data
“Corporate surveillance has really spiked and they're actually related because government surveillance actually uses
The data you give to corporations. That's where they're getting most of the data from anyway.”
DuckDuckGo Studies Found Location-Biased Search Results for Political Queries
“We've done several studies on political terms and people in different areas are seeing completely different results when you search for things like gun control or political candidate name or something like that.”
Google Tracks 80% of the Top Million Websites; Facebook Tracks 25%
“Google's on about 80% of the top million sites and a lot of that's Google Analytics, but also, like the Google Ads and stuff like that. Facebook's on 25% and that's this Facebook pixel where it could be the Facebook login, or just sites run Facebook ads, or th…”
Wolfe: Thomas Reardon single-handedly coded Microsoft's Internet Explorer
“Single-handedly codes Internet Explorer, and makes a lot of money, retires, does another company, retires, and then early thirties now.”
Wolfe: Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold notoriously eviscerated dissenters at Microsoft
“And it's interesting because Bill Gates, in a sense, was notorious for that. You know Nathan Mervold, brilliant, you know, but would sort of eviscerate people if they were wrong.”
Teachers Grade Identical Essays a Quarter-Point Higher With Female Names
“The number one positive factor on on your, on the essay was a female name at the top of the paper. It was worth an extra quarter of a grade. A equals four point O, B equals three point O, C equals three point O. It was worth a quarter of a grade. It was worth …”
Robinson: Stephen Hawking Estimated a 95% Chance AI Destroys Humanity
“Stephen Hawking,
Gave mankind a one in 20 shot of surviving AI.
A one in 20 shot.
And you can do the math, that means a 19 and 20 shot, we don't survive.
AI.
That's how serious it is.”
Robinson: AlphaZero surpassed all human chess knowledge within four hours
“And in four hours, that program leapfrogged all existing human knowledge of the game, and has a chess rating of, hard to estimate, like, 36, 3700, compared with 3300.”
Coloroso: Nineteen US states still legally permit corporal punishment in schools
“We still have 19 states in this country that allow corporal punishment.”
Gawande: High-volume Toronto hernia clinic outperformed trained surgeons at lower cost
“One of my very first article was about a computer that could diagnose heart attacks better than better than the most experienced doctor could, and a hernia factory in Toronto where the surgeons were, none of them were actually trained as surgeons. One was like…”
Gawande: Core operational management practices directly improve hospital patient outcomes
“We now see that there is direct correlation between the more of that you do, the better off patients are, substantially better off patients are, and better off in terms of quality.”
Gawande: Only 25% of seriously ill patients discuss quality-of-life goals
“We're at 25% Of people who have a serious life-limiting illness in the last year and have been hospitalized, only 25% have had that conversation about their goals and priorities for their quality of life with their clinician.”
Gawande: Palliative Care Conversations Extended Lung Cancer Patients' Lives by 25%
“Including a randomized trial at the Mass General Hospital with stage four lung cancer patients who all died in the course of care. And when they had conversations with a palliative care expert about their goals for their quality of life, The result was that th…”
Cowen: US cities are more racially segregated, but suburbs are not
“If you mean racially segregated, cities are more racially segregated. Suburbs are not. So that's a mixed story.”
Cowen: Blockchain has found no killer apps beyond Bitcoin in 10 years
“I don't think we found killer apps for the blockchain yet, other than Bitcoin, and we've had blockchain for 10 years.”
MacAskill: Global health aid massively outperforms economic development aid
“So if you look at the past 50 years of aid spending, the track record of spending on economic development is really very mixed. You know, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. The track record of spending on global health is just outstanding.”
Shaper scale users lost weight while standard scale users gained it
“So we just finished a large study. Some people got the regular scale and those people gained a little bit of weight every month. And some people got our scale and they lost 0.7% of their body weight every month for five months. The people with the regular scal…”
Collison: Post-2004 EU Immigration to Ireland Brought No Material Social Strife
“Well, it's interesting too, from a cultural standpoint, where Ireland has had very high rates of immigration, particularly post the expansion of the EU in 2004 a very large number of Eastern European immigrants moved to Ireland when those countries acceded to …”
Collison: Tokyo kept housing costs stable through minimal supply restrictions
“Tokyo has over the last couple of decades, been an improbable, well, not especially improbable, but has been such an enormous economic success story. And, you know, you had the boom and the bust and the supposed stagnation of Japan in the kind of early ninetie…”
Oakley: Neuroscience proves math mastery requires practice and repetition
“When it comes to math, it's like, ah, let's not talk about how the neuroscience supports the fact that you also need practice and repetition for math, because it, then you start getting into the math wars.”
Oakley: Karpicke study shows active recall outperforms rereading and concept mapping
“There's a great study by Jeff Karpicki of Purdue about where he showed what is the best way to learn if you're reading, for example, a complex paper on some scientific study or subject. The best way is you read it, and then you look away, and you can, you see …”
Oakley: Poor working memory correlates with creativity and better simplification
“If you have a really bad working memory, in other words, the things that you hold temporarily in mind, that, that can be a great thing, because number one, there's good research that shows that you're more you're more creative, and another thing is it allows y…”
Oakley: Human working memory holds roughly four slots, not seven
“We used to think there are seven slots in working memory, so it's like seven things you can hold in mind. Like seven numbers. That's why, you know, it was four, five, three, seven, two, three, nine, or whatever phone number had seven digits in it, because they…”
Heffernan: Business schools rely on predetermined case studies instead of teaching history
“And history is almost never taught in business schools. It's all the live case studies. Or the case studies, you know, where the ending is known, and therefore implicitly, structurally looks predetermined.”
Machiavellian Tactics Succeed in One-Shot Deals but Fail Long-Term
“There are measures of Machiavellianism, and you, if you're a Machiavellian, you know, and you lie and manipulate and don't mind really harming people to rise in power, you'll do well in one-shot negotiations, but for the most part, you don't do too well in ris…”
Voss: People split evenly into fight, flight, or accommodate communication types
“If you think of, and the world breaks up in a, pretty much evenly into thirds. It's from our caveman days. It's fight, flight, make friends, response to threat. We either fight it, we run from it, or we make friends with it. And the world really does pretty ev…”
Diverse Global Populations Develop Obesity When Adopting Western Diets
“Inuits near the Arctic Circle or Native Americans or First Nations people or you know, African populations or South Pacific Islanders and Middle Eastern populations or Southeast Asians, they all
Experience obesity and diabetes epidemics when their environment …”
US Diabetes Prevalence Has Surged 700% Since the Late 1950s
“In the U.S., and according to the Centers for Disease Control in the U.S., since the late 19 fifties, diabetes prevalence has increased 700%.”
Former WHO Chief Admitted Odds of Stopping Chronic Disease Are Near Zero
“The Director General of the UN, a woman named Margaret Chan, a year ago referred to them as slow motion disasters, and she predicted, this was fascinating, this was at a keynote address of the National Academies of Medicine in Washington, and she gave a number…”
Hospital Records Show US Diabetes Rates Were Almost Nonexistent Before 1850
“And you find out, for instance, in the U.S. That diabetes rates, ah, in, were virtually nonexistent, even though it was a very, a relatively easy disease to diagnose You saw very little sign of it pre-eighteen 50, and even, for the most part, pre-eighteen seve…”
Science Framed Obesity Around Calories Because Calorimeters Were the Only Available Tool
“Nutrition science from the 18 sixties to the 19 twenties was completely dominated by, as all sciences are, by what they could measure, the technologies available to make observations, and all they had were they had devices called calorimeters, Where they can m…”
Pre-WWII German and Austrian Scientists Concluded Obesity Is a Hormonal Disorder
“The German and Austrian clinicians, and Germany and Austria was, you know, these people were doing far and away the best medical science in the world at the time, and they pioneered all the fields of science relevant to Obesity, so metabolism, genetics endocri…”
Bridgewater anticipated the 2008 financial crisis by studying the 1930s
“The only reason we were able to anticipate it and benefit from it is because it, we felt that it was necessary to understand what had happened in the thirties and what happened before, because the same things happen over and over again.”
Dalio: Major Debt Crises Occur Roughly Once Every 75 Years
“Some things happen once every 75 years, particularly debt crises and those kinds of things.”
Grant: Givers are overrepresented at the best and worst performance extremes
“And, you know, I finally, as I took a closer look at the data, I found that, you know, for salespeople, for engineers and even medical professionals the givers were overrepresented on both extremes of the success spectrum. They made up a disproportionate numbe…”
Grant: Helping others equals core task performance in average evaluations
“We know, for example, that if you look at the meta-analyses that Podzikoff and colleagues have published, that the amount of time you spend helping others is as critical to your job performance as how well you do your actual tasks. They carry about equal weigh…”
Domingos: Basic ML Often Outperforms Highly Trained Human Pathologists
“And the thing that's amazing is that often just by taking a basic machine learning algorithm and applying on a database of, for example, x-rays and diagnosis, you actually wind up with something that is better. That, for example you know, pathology than a high…”
Domingos: Commercial Aviation Would Be Safer Flown Entirely by Computers
“And in fact, it would be safer if it was completely flown by a computer. You know, pilots tend to take, you know, the controls at landing and takeoff, which are actually the more dangerous moments. And they make more errors than the computers do.”
Tetlock: Geopolitical forecasting relies on 70% skill and 30% luck
“Well, what we find in the ARPA tournament is, is that there certainly is an element of chance in predicting geopolitical and geoeconomic outcomes but the skill luck ratio seems to be about 70 30.”
Dixon: a16z employs over 100 non-investor operational staff
“We have over a hundred employees who are not investors at our firm, whose sole job it is to help companies do things like recruit employees you know build their, you know, their customers base.”
Dixon: Traditional public mutual funds are driving late-stage private venture rounds
“It's actually what you, what is happening is firms that are, that historically had been public investors. So for example, Fidelity T. Rowe Price, like a whole Wellington, all of these kind of well-known public market investors. Have now moved to invest in priv…”