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
Zurbuchen: Avoidable James Webb Space Telescope mistakes cost taxpayers $800 million
“During that time, as well as the year before, this team was so, had such challenges that it was making mistakes that cost the taxpayer of the United States, eight hundred million dollars. The mistakes themselves cost six hundred million dollars because of lack…”
Holland: Modern security machine learning is just 2005 antivirus analytics
“The existing machine learning implementations and a lot of solutions out there is the exact same thing that, you know, I've seen in antiviruses back in 2005. They just didn't call it machine learning. It was just training analytics to look for anomalies and.”
Barrett: No universal physical signature exists for any studied emotion
“In fact, there is no universal physical signature for any emotion that's ever been studied.”
San Francisco pedestrians routinely inhale and track aerosolized fecal matter indoors
“In many cities on the coast of the US, like San Francisco most infamously, you are definitely, people are definitely inhaling fecal matter as they're walking outside. They're definitely getting it on their shoes and so on and tracking it in, even in, like, sma…”
Kahneman: Income above $70,000 raises life satisfaction but not emotional happiness
“The research I did with Angus Deaton at Princeton, famous economist, we showed that in terms of happiness, in terms of emotional tone, positive and negative, Having a lot of money doesn't make you happier, but being poor makes you miserable. So that's above a …”
Kahneman: Some evidence cited in 'Thinking, Fast and Slow' has been discredited
“There's been a replication crisis in psychology. And some of the stuff that I really believed in when I wrote Thinking Fast and Slow, some of that evidence has been discredited.”
Collins: Pioneering innovators rarely win; scaling the right innovations matters
“There's very little evidence that the pioneering innovators win. And what we found instead is that it's not being innovative that matters. It's the ability to scale the right innovations.”
Johnson: 70% of North American therapists see couples without specialized training
“The fact of the matter is, 70% of mental health professionals in North America Say they see couples now, because the demand is huge, and most of those people have not been trained in couples therapy.”
Haidt: A child would wait 700,000 years in a car before abduction
“There are about a hundred people, a hundred kids abducted a year in the United States by strangers. At present rates of abduction, you'd have to leave your kid alone in a car in a parking lot for 700,000 years before they would probably be abducted.”
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.”
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…”
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…”
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…”
Nejatian: Opendoor's top external expense was millions to a consulting firm
“And usually for tech companies, like, your largest expense to an external vendor ends up being, like, your cloud provider. But for Opendoor, number one was millions of dollars written to a very large consulting firm.”
Gurley: Silicon Valley companies are widely using Chinese open-source AI models
“I would say it's kind of a quiet secret, just because I haven't read it on the front page of the journal, that, you know, especially from a breadth standpoint, like a volume, the companies are using these models all over Silicon Valley.”
Gurley: QQQ has probably beaten 80% to 90% of VC funds
“Some people have even highlighted the fact that, you know, QQQ has probably outperformed 80 or 90% of venture funds.”
Pincus: Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams doesn't speak to me to this day
“And Jonathan Abrams was
I'm very paranoid about any of us as investors doing anything close.
In fact, he doesn't speak to me to this day.
He feels like tribe.
He feels like we all kind of usurped and stole his idea for social networking by doing what we we…”
Pincus: Feud between Peter Thiel and Sequoia killed early Zynga financing
“The first round I raised, Was impossibly hard, and I got caught in between a fight, in a fight in between Peter Thiel and Sequoia, and he had just started Founders Fund, and Sequoia didn't like that, and they were mad at each other, and Peter had said, I'm gon…”
Pincus: Every Amazon C-staff member was once Jeff Bezos's technical assistant
“In fact, I believe every C staff member at Amazon was at one point Jeff Bezos' tech assistant, And Andy Jassy was, and the CEO.”
The World Bank Advised Against Building South Korea's Gyeongbu Expressway
“The World Bank told the Korean government the project was economically and technologically infeasible and would add little to Korea's development.”
Korean Business Leaders Paid 500 Million Won Bi-Annually to President Park
“He and other major Korean business leaders had been making regular payments to Korean presidents as a matter of routine, For decades. Under Park Chung-hee, it was roughly five hundred million won twice a year.”
Brockman: Code written without AI is now a vanishing fraction
“It's hard to know what percent of the code is not written by AI. It's a vanishing fraction. The actual Writing of code. Currently, the AI is much better than humans at writing code, given the right context, given the right structure. Now there's parts of the a…”
Brockman: OpenAI models previously leaned into sycophancy before training adjustments
“We've actually gone through an evolution of how we train the models to user preferences, and that we've seen that at one point, like last year, that the models really did start to lean into telling you what you wanted to hear, saying, oh, that's such a great a…”
Liemandt: Every grade and subject at Alpha School tests in top 1%
“Every single class, yes, every grade, every subject, top one percent.”
Liemandt: Alpha Students Learn Twice as Fast in Just Two Hours Daily
“We also, our kids, fundamentally, in the two hours, are learning twice as fast as if they sat in school for six and did homework.”
Liemandt: Alpha 3rd and 4th graders outscore 50% of US high schoolers
“I have third and fourth graders who outscore 50% of the high school graduates of this country.”
Liemandt: Alpha's top 1% students learn 3x faster than elite peers
“Go take other 99% kids and see why ours are learning three times faster than those kids. Right. You can get the score that says, we benchmark our 99 percentile kids not against the average kid. We benchmark them against the top one percent kid. And our top one…”
Liemandt: Median US Student's Test Score Stagnates From Eighth Grade to Graduation
“The average kid in the US, like on this map score, this NWA map, there's a 300 point scale. If you take, I can't remember exact number but if you take an eighth grader, they will go up one point by senior year. How is that even possible? The median, that's the…”
Liemandt: Alpha's App Teaches K-8 Subjects to Mastery in Under 30 Hours
“Kids can learn 10 times faster. So if you take, like, just here's a metric for you. Our subjects, like take seventh grade science. In a normal standard school, you have a 180 school days. So an hour a day, maybe some homework, couple hundred hours, right? The …”
Liemandt: Alpha High School Student Submits Paper to Nature as Lead Researcher
“No high school student has ever been the lead researcher on something published in nature. And we have an alpha kid who's submitted.”
Liemandt: Harvard study shows AI tutors outperform top Harvard teachers 2x
“Harvard published a paper that That their best teaching class is their physics one-on-one class, one of their best, you know, teachers, and they did an A-B test with AI tutors versus them, and they published that Harvard, you know, there's a great paper, Harva…”
Liemandt: All Alpha School Graduates in College Maintain a 4.0 GPA
“Our kids at college aren't getting paid, they're all four-oh students.”
Liemandt: Alpha School Prepares Students for SAT 10x Faster at 20 Hours
“I mean, we're 20 hours, not 200. Right? We're 10 times faster.”
Tenev: Harmonic solved at least one unsolved Erdős problem
“There's something like 1100 Erdos problems. About half of them are open unsolved. And yeah, Harmonic solved at least one of them.”
Tenev: Harmonic surpassed Google AlphaProof's capabilities within one year
“Alpha Proof was the first AI model to get a silver medal, to achieve silver medal performance at the IMO last year.
But Alpha Proof they did not announce a gold this year.
So, yeah, we were we were, the Harmonic team was excited about that, that, you know, i…”
Ovitz claims CAA never lost a single client during his entire tenure
“In the years I was at CA, we never lost a client, and the reason was if they tired of one person, they'd go to the next, but everyone was up to speed.”
Poilievre: 2.2 Million Canadians Use Food Banks as Scurvy Returns
“I find it appalling that we had 2.2 million people lined up at food banks, that we got a return of scurvy in Canada, or one in four kids are going to school hungry.”
Poilievre: Canadian housing costs doubled over the past decade
“The doubled housing costs. So young people can't even come close to making a down payment. You know, it takes to your late, in your late thirties to afford a down payment.”
Cava limited investment bankers to 9% of its IPO share distribution.
“Essentially we only allowed the investment banker, nine percent of the shares in distribution, which essentially went to their clients and the hedge funds. We protected 91% of it, of that distribution so that it ended up in the right hands.”
Wozniak: Jobs hid thousands in Atari bonus money for Breakout design
“Woz writes, the whole thing used 45 chips, and Steve paid me half the 700 bucks he said they paid him. They were paying us based on how few chips I could do it in. Later I found out he got paid a bit more for it. Like a few thousand dollars than he said at the…”
Volkswagen secretly supplied gray market dealers to maintain artificial scarcity
“He discovered he could sell Volkswagen as a gray marketer, buying beetles that Volkswagen secretly supplied while keeping official dealers on the allocation to create artificial scarcity.”
Diller asserts 80% to 90% of employees immediately cash out vested options
“What I have learned is that most people, you think that giving large populations options in the company's securities, that they would hold on to them. And what you find out is 80, 90%. The first moment that they, quote, vest, they cashed them.”
Evans: Kodak was once the best-selling US digital camera vendor
“What actually happens is, once it starts happening, Kodak go all in on digital cameras. At one point, they were the best-selling digital camera vendor in the USA, and if you look at their annual ports at the time, they think this is going to be great, because …”
Ron Conway email secured Flexport a San Francisco license in six hours
“So I told Ron Conway about this situation and he emailed the late Ed Lee, who was our mayor. And I, Ron was like one of his big donors and friends. And we got the license within six hours.”
Kahneman: Incomes above $70,000 boost life satisfaction but not emotional happiness
“The research I did with Angus Deaton at Princeton, famous economist, we showed that in terms of happiness, in terms of emotional tone, positive and negative, Having a lot of money doesn't make you happier, but being poor makes you miserable. So, that's above a…”
Hastings admits Netflix relied on creative instinct to greenlight House of Cards
“You know, there's some data, but I would say that's raw. It's instinct that the thing you've got a partial script, you've got some casting, and you have to guess how good is that show going to be. So to figure out what it's going to comp against in terms of yo…”