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 1,118 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
Duke: Smart people aware of cognitive biases are worse at overcoming them
“In fact, there's a lot of evidence that says that smart people who know about them are actually worse.”
MacAskill: Birth country and parental wealth dictate 80% of personal income
“80% of the income that people earn is explained by the country of birth and socioeconomic status of their parents”
MacAskill: The 'Scared Straight' juvenile intervention program actively increased crime rates
“And what they discovered was not only was the program ineffective, it was actively harmful. So the juveniles who went through this program would go on to commit more crimes, you know, that's more thefts, more rapes, more murders if they had gone through this p…”
Oakley: US ranks dead last in student math ability among 22 OECD nations
“I think we're dead last in the group of 22 top nations in the OECD as far as the math Abilities of our students.”
Oakley's $5,000 basement course matched Harvard's entire online course enrollment
“Our one little course that was made for less than 5000 dollars, mostly in my basement had on this order the same number of students as all of Harvard's online courses put together, made for millions of dollars with hundreds of people.”
Half of Emotional Expressions Are Universal; 25% Are Culturally Specific
“Across these five different cultures, China, India, Japan, Korea, the U S really different cultural systems. About 50% of any expression that an individual would admit is this universal expression, you know, where if you get embarrassed, you turn your head awa…”
Wealthy Individuals Are More Likely to Cheat and Drive Aggressively
“Our studies show fitting this power abuse hypothesis that if I'm from the well-to-do and, you know, or feeling I'm from the upper class I'm less likely to attend to people carefully when they're speaking. I in an experiment, I'm more likely to lie and say I go…”
Mauboussin: NBA outcomes rely on skill; hockey and baseball involve luck
“The NBA is the sport that's furthest from randomness, furthest from pure luck configuration, and sports like actually ice hockey and baseball are actually quite much closer to being random.”
Science Proved Insulin Regulates Fat Storage by the Early 1960s
“By the early 19 sixties, it was clear that insulin, the hormone insulin, was the primary regulator of fat accumulation in the human body.”
The Sugar Industry Amplified Existing Dogma Rather Than Inventing Doubt
“Unlike the tobacco industry, so the tobacco industry's job was to somehow try to convince the world that the research community was wrong, and to sow confusion about what the research community was saying. What the sugar industry had to do was remind the resea…”
Tetlock: 50 minutes of debiasing training improves forecasting accuracy by 10%
“We got about, for average forecasters who are randomly assigned to an experimental condition in which they get Kahneman style debiasing exercises the improvement is in the vicinity of 10%. And that's a big effect when you consider that, you know, we're talking…”
Dixon: Top-performing VC firms have higher loss rates than lesser firms
“There's a lot of data in the VC industry that actually, interestingly enough, the best firms actually have a higher loss rate, meaning they lose money more frequently than the less.”
Enders: Dietary Fiber Protects Against Colon and Metabolically-Driven Cancers
“Fiber can protect you of colon cancer, for example, and then other cancers that are related to those metabolic processes that I mentioned.”
Dr. Giulia Enders: Stress hormones select for harmful gut microbes in studies
“And also some microbes, and that is maybe the most hygienic part of it all, they thrive on stress hormones. They are really able to deal with them very well, and others are not. You're kind of making an atmosphere for your gut. We're selecting gut microbes tha…”
Pincus: Zynga drove 20% of Facebook page views and 10% of revenue at IPO
“They gave it on Friday, and they said, you have till Monday to sign this agreement, or we're gonna take down your apps, which was their right and that could have happened the whole way through, and who knows what would have happened, because, you know, at this…”
Weinberg: Autonomous AI law firms are illegal in 48 US states
“Basically, there, there's two rules. One is state by state, which is the unauthorized practice of law. It's actually a felony. And so, you know, you actually need to be barred in order to give legal advice. And then the other one is an ethical rule. So it's by…”
Brockman: Altman, Pachocki, Sidor, Madry, and Brockman Charted New AI Venture
“There were a few of my close collaborators who quit that day as well. That's Jakob, Shimon, Alexander, and the five of us. So Those people plus Sam. We all got together and we started to chart out what a new company could look like.”
Brockman: Altman Asked Satya Nadella to Fund Venture Absorbing All OpenAI Staff
“Sam talked to Satya, who we'd been talking about. Hey, can you be a funder? Could you know, help, help support this new endeavor? I was like, Hey, actually, can we expand from the small life raft to like, yes, can we take everyone? And we're like, all right, w…”
Brockman: Global GPU production is nowhere near one GPU per person
“If you just wanted enough compute for, you know, you wanted one GPU for every person in the world, you're talking like eight billion GPUs. We are not on a trajectory to build anywhere near that level of compute, right? It's like, you know, hundreds of thousand…”
Teskey: The untapped retail market for alternative assets exceeds institutional sizing
“That market is actually bigger. The individual market is actually bigger than the institutional market today. And it has almost zero penetrations from alternatives.”
Tenev: Robinhood restricted GameStop trading for about one day
“We had to make a tough call to put GameStop and a bunch of other companies on position closing only, which basically meant you couldn't open up new positions, take on more risk for a period of about one day.”
Tenev: Harmonic's Aristotle achieved gold medal performance at the IMO
“Earlier this year, we actually achieved gold medal performance at the International Mathematical Olympiad, which is the world's most prestigious mathematics competition. These are like cracked high schoolers, like five people got perfect scores in the Internat…”
Former Home Depot CEO Robert Nardelli Resigned With $210M Severance Package
“He resigned under pressure With a two hundred and ten million dollar severance package that sparked public outrage.”
Sutherland: Trial Lawyers Heavily Fund US Democrats to Block Tort Reform
“Particularly because there's no tort law reform in the US, and that's partly because, I was told yesterday, trial lawyers are among largest donors to the Democratic Party because they resist any kind of tort law reform.”
Sutherland: Swedish Study Found Sunbed Users Had Higher Life Expectancy
“So there was a study, actually, among Swedes where there was a higher instance of skin cancer among Swedish sunbed addicts, but they actually had a higher life expectancy, which they didn't expect.”
Parrish: Steve Wozniak Sold Cheap Pre-IPO Apple Shares to 40 Excluded Colleagues
“He took his own shares and sold them at a deeply discounted price to 40 colleagues. Who'd been left out after the IPO. He was giving away shares to people he felt deserved them. He called it the Woz plan.”
Parrish: Apple's Official Apple III Fix Was Dropping the Machine Onto Desks
“When customers called about system failures, technicians would tell them to lift the front of the computer three to six inches off their desk and drop it. The physical shock might reset the loose chips. The official fix for the computer worth thousands of doll…”
Scilipoti: Valeant Manipulated Accounting and Ran Fraudulent Pharmacy Network
“If you look deeper, they were just manipulating the accounting and changing the pricing on, on drugs and creating a fraudulent network of online pharmacies.”
Evans: AI labs do not continuously retrain models on live user queries
“They're not retraining the models all the time with the data. So you don't have that kind of runaway effect as, like, continuous flow and more queries produces, you know, better results.”
Johnson: Human brains have a specific neural pathway for attachment panic
“When we feel rejected and abandoned by the person we most depend on, There's a special pathway in our emotional brain, and it's reserved for attachment panic”
Johnson: Exclusive long-term relationships report highest sexual satisfaction and frequency
“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.”
FedMart paying double competitor wages in 1957 resulted in lower operating costs
“The San Antonio retailers paid 50 cents an hour in 1957. Saul paid a dollar. Let's look at what happened. Employees could afford health care and dignity. Communities got stable families, not desperate workers. FedMart attracted the best people with near zero t…”
Kahneman: Insurance underwriters varied by 50% on identical cases, despite 10% expectations
“So, we asked the executives the following question. Suppose you take two underwriters at random. By what percentage do they differ? I mean, you look at the difference between the premium, divide that by the average premium. What number do you get? And people e…”
Schwab forced succession planning with an asymmetric 5 percent profit-share penalty
“Effective immediately, all manager shares dropped from 50 to 45%. If they appointed an assistant, that person got 10%. If they didn't, the company kept the extra five percent.”
Pattison fired his lowest-performing car salesperson every month without exception
“Two years later, Jimmy had developed what outsiders would call ruthless, but what he saw as a very necessary policy, crystallized in one brutal rule. Every month, whoever sold the fewest cars got fired. No exceptions. No negotiations. No second chances.”
Gil: Protocols to create viruses are already public without AI
“The protocols for cloning and PCR and all this, it's all on the internet. It's all posted by major labs. It's in all the textbooks. Like that's not new knowledge that people can't just go and do right now if they really wanted to.”
Gil: Bay Area represents 25% of global private tech wealth creation
“Traditionally the U.S. Has been about half of that globally. The Bay Area has been about half of that. So, 25% of all private technology wealth creation happens in one place, right? In one city. If you add in New York and L.A., then you're at like 40% of the w…”
Garry Tan: Y Combinator's unicorn hit rate increased from 3.5% to 5.5%
“If anything, I think that the unicorn rate has gone up over time. You know 1015 years ago, I think it was closer to maybe three and a half to four percent, and now we're around five and a half percent. Some batches from You know, maybe 2017, 20 18, or, you kno…”
Buffett: Henry Singleton Had the Best Capital Deployment Record in America
“Warren Buffett once said that Henry Singleton had the best operating and capital deployment record in American business, bar none.”
Poilievre: Canada generates $53 USD per work hour versus $78 in US
“And so today we generate 53 dollars USD for every hour we work as Canadians. The Americans generate 78 dollars.”
Poilievre: Canada receives $15k investment per worker annually versus $28k in US
“In Canada, we get 15,000 dollars of investment per worker per year. In the States, it's 28,000. We're way behind even the OECD average. We get 65 cents of investment per worker For every dollar an OECD average worker gets.”
Poilievre: Ireland's GDP per capita is twice that of Canada
“Now Ireland's per capita GDP is twice Canada's.”
Poilievre: Canada's cold weather makes LNG liquefaction 25% cheaper
“We have an enormous advantage there too, because our cold weather makes it 25% cheaper to liquefy.”
Poilievre: 20,000 immigrant doctors and 32,000 immigrant nurses cannot practice in Canada
“So we have, for example 20,000 immigrant doctors, 32,000 immigrant nurses who can't work because they don't have a license in Canada.”
Vanderbilt Intentionally Crashed a Railroad's Stock to Secretly Acquire Controlling Interest
“Though initially dismissed, Vanderbilt quietly joined the Long Island Railroad Board, redirecting business away from the Stonington. Shareholders panicked at the high debt and reduced traffic. Its stock plummeted, allowing Vanderbilt and his allies, including …”
Flatt: Credit Spreads Are the Lowest in History
“Today, Base rates are high. We're back to five. Guess what? Spreads are the lowest they've ever been in history. We just did a thirty-year Brookfield Corporation financing, so we're borrowing money for 30 years, fixed for that time period, and it's a 125 over.”