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 83 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
Balaji: COVID-19 forces physical de-globalization and massive digital scale
“This is in a weird way, like a forced de-globalization, radical forced de-globalization, because all the things that were benefits, like economies of scale, large groups of people, big crowds, and so on, are now big demerits, at least in real life.
And so it …”
FDA bureaucracy blocked US coronavirus testing throughout February 2020
“Net-net a bureaucratic process inhibited the United States from testing for a critical 30 day-ish period from January to February and gave people a false sense of security that there weren't that many coronavirus cases in the U.S.”
The CDC was bottlenecked to running only 12 coronavirus tests per day
“CDC itself was doing 12 tests a day, and that basically meant, you know, for a country of three hundred million people that's testing 12 a day, that's a centralized bottleneck.”
Balaji: Society faces an unbundling of institutions before rebundling
“Prior to any rebundling, I think we're on track for quite the unbundling.”
Srinivasan: Public Health Risk Is Flattened Into Binary Morality Plays
“One of the most tragic aspects of all of this is that probabilistic cost benefit decisions are turned into, you know, morality plays where there's an obvious zero one for everybody of a billion people on Twitter. And that is just not what reality is.”
Srinivasan: Lighter 2010s regulation would have yielded 1B sequenced genomes
“If everybody, if we had not held back personal genomics in the 2010, if we had not so heavily regulated it, We would have a billion people with personal GM, just like we have a billion people with, or hundreds of millions, at least with fitness trackers, right…”
Srinivasan: Google search quality is now quite low for many queries
“Google had this great thing with where it was able to use backlinks as a imperfect measure of search quality. And now they've, you know, lost sight of that, and search quality is actually quite low for many queries, you know, as you've probably seen, right?”
Srinivasan: Putting Scientific Literature On-Chain Has Wikipedia-Level Complexity
“What I'm describing here, by the way, is of the complexity of Wikipedia, but not greater than that. You're basically talking about taking the scientific literature, putting it into truly reproducible research format and putting it on chain such that it's perma…”
Balaji Srinivasan: Betting Reduces Partisanship by Imposing Financial Downside on Tribal Beliefs
“And that's actually why betting reduces partisanship. We'll see if this is a social science experiment that doesn't replicate, but I have seen it in my own experience that if you just ask people what the answer is, they'll give you the tribal answer. The momen…”
Balaji: Mid-20th century media and institutional centralization was historically atypical
“The I love Lucy environment of 1950 where there's just one telephone company and two superpowers and three television stations and everybody's brainwashed in the same thing. And by the way, that's a very atypical environment through history. That level of cent…”
Srinivasan: Pre-internet free speech was constrained by a media oligopoly
“Distribution was so scarce that he had to kill for the distribution. Like that publication was so scarce that he felt that he had to kill somebody. So what that meant is there wasn't truly free speech. There were, there's a small oligopoly of a few dozen folks…”
Srinivasan: Practical speech will expand despite institutional attempts to suppress it
“It's like a graph that went all the way up into the right in terms of practical speech. And then they're trying to like jacket back down, but it's going to come back up because the attempt to deprive somebody of the practical, right? You just gave them that vo…”
Srinivasan: Modern street protests are digital information wars printed out physically
“It's literally just fighting the information more online. And then eventually when you hit enter and print it out, it's a riot here, or it's a, you know, it's a protest there. You're this cloud swirling information war gets printed out into the physical world.…”
Balaji: Canceling and deplatforming are tactics in digital civil war
“Unbanking, canceling, deplatforming, all that stuff, their tactics in a social civil war. Right. They're meant to make a node on their side, wink out or change color.”
Balaji: Rogan cancellation effort showed defenders are now too numerous to cancel
“Crucially, there's a big difference between this versus previous cancellations, which is they could only win it like 55, 45, not like 95, five. How can you see that? Because they couldn't cancel the people defending Rogan. They were too numerous.”
Balaji: Nationalists and socialists oppose crypto; libertarians on both sides support it
“The nationalists and socialists are against cryptocurrency, but the libertarian left and libertarian right are for it.”
Srinivasan: China's Three Red Lines policy intentionally engineered Evergrande's controlled demolition
“In China, actually, Xi Jinping has talked about how he did not want houses to be used for investment. And actually that's part of their policy there is to try to intentionally pop the bubble rather than having a bear or Lehman type thing. Evergrande was like a…”
Balaji Srinivasan: Most English internet users will be Indian
“Most English speakers on the internet are going to be Indian.”
Srinivasan: Web2 has become unexciting like legacy enterprise desktop programming
“All the web two stuff is basically like enterprise software. Okay. And it's like doing desktop programming. Look, it's fine. It's good. It's fundable. Knock yourself out. I'll probably use it. And I'm glad you're doing it, but it's also like, Eh, it's not that…”
Srinivasan: Narrow credentialism fails when tackling multifaceted crises
“Nobody knows pulmonology and infectious diseases and epidemiology and genomics and supply chains, all of these different things at once. So, so I don't think it's useful to be very narrowly credentialist, though credentials can certainly help to an extent when…”
Srinivasan: COVID-19 Total Hospitalizations and Deaths Will Exceed Ebola Due to Scale
“It's nowhere near as lethal as Ebola, but its scale is likely to be much higher than Ebola.
And so the total number of people hospitalized or killed by it may be much larger.”
COVID-19 could accelerate biomedical innovation as the internet accelerated software
“The silver lining of this is, this could be as much of an accelerant for biomedicine as the internet was for software.”
Balaji: Wuhan hospital overload and lockdown prove COVID is far worse than flu
“Wuhan was a normal city on December first of last year, and by January 23rd, all seven hospitals were filled. People were being sent home to die. The entire city was put under quarantine, and it was, you know, the largest, like, you know, quarantine in human h…”
Srinivasan: Technologists Must Enter Citizen Journalism and Politics as Civic Duty
“Folks who have any form of technical or scientific background, I think need to, as like a civic duty, and this is, you know, both for this crisis and then for future kinds of things, we have to do journalism, citizen journalism, like a year of it, for example,…”
Balaji: I failed to predict public opposition to COVID-19 vaccines
“The one thing I hadn't forecasted was that in the presence of a potentially deadly virus that people would be against you know, vaccines.”
Srinivasan: Society's Information Supply Chain Flows From Academia to Media to Regulation
“The way that our system is based is academia study something. They write up a paper, the media reports on it, and then the government regulates on that basis. It, that is the sense in which our society is based on quote science. And if you think about it, almo…”
Balaji Srinivasan: National sovereignty requires control over communication and transactions
“So sovereignty, maintaining sovereignty means control over your communication and transaction channels.”
Srinivasan: First COVID-19 infections likely began in November 2019
“If your first case is December first, the person probably got infected in November, then things started compounding from there.”
Srinivasan: Diagnostic PCR and sequencing are standard tech, contagion is main testing hurdle
“People have been doing RT-PCR, and they've been doing sequencing on aluminum machines for basically a decade plus at this point. The main difficulty here is that the SARS-CoV-I virus is very contagious and dangerous, so you need to be even more careful with sa…”
Srinivasan: Continuous temperature-tracking wearables like Oura will become mainstream
“I mean, I, I'm not an investor in Oura or anything like that, but I know that it's pretty cool, where it does monitor your body temperature over time. Something like that, I think, will become very mainstream.”
Growth-rate thinkers model change while base-rate thinkers model continuity
“Growth rate people model how the world can change. Base rate people think about how the world is basically going to stay the same. And so the growth rate people are often mathematical. They're used to exponential growth for things like iPhones or Facebook or B…”
Srinivasan: Wuhan's 40,000-family banquet caused COVID-19 cases to surge vertically
“Wuhan had a gathering of 40,000 families, which is a really big thing, right? And that's a great way to just take something that was a viral fire and just make it go completely vertical.”
Srinivasan: I am funding new search engines that index on-chain data
“New search engines, I'm already seeing them arise. I'm funding them that are indexing this kind of content because the huge leap, you know, the crossing the chasm is a recognition that blockchains are not just suitable for storing financial data, but social da…”
Srinivasan: Naming COVID-19 abstractly rather than 'Wuhan flu' avoids harmful regional stigma
“Didn't want to stigmatize a region by calling it like the Wuhan flu or the China flu. Like Reddit has a community called the China flu. That's not helpful for lots of reasons you know, like That area is hard enough hit. You don't want to hit it like, you know,…”
Srinivasan: Faulty Sewage Caused 300 SARS Infections at Amoy Gardens
“There's a famous, infamous case of a apartment complex in Hong Kong called Imoy Gardens, and about 300 people there contracted SARS because, you know, it gave some of them diarrhea, and this is gross, but, you know, some of them flushed, and the sewage system …”