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 7,517 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 46 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
Davis: Private equity reporting returns without leverage adjustments is despicable
“It's just despicable that you show your returns, but you don't adjust them for leverage. Like benchmark them to the S and P with the same amount of leverage”
Bryan Johnson: Giving plasma to my father slowed his aging by 25 years
“When I gave my father plasma, my father's speed of aging slowed by the equivalent of 25 years. So from a 71 year old to a 46 year old, and those results remained the stable for six months, which is the last measurement we did.”
Eastman: Toxic, Machiavellian Leaders Often Achieve Incredible Results
“I've seen
Certain leaders be horrible and get incredible things done.
They violate every book ever written about leadership and work a team to complete death and play this Machiavellian game of just when they're about to fire, just about when they're about to …”
Slootman: Mass layoffs expose the hypocrisy of Google and Salesforce family cultures
“Companies like Salesforce and even Google come to mind, but you know, in the end they're laying people off too, by the thousands. Okay. So I guess it's not family after all.”
Rey Flemings: NY State rejected 2,000 ordered ventilators for unknown reasons
“Only to find out that the state of New York ultimately did not want the ventilators. I had no idea why and still, you know, kind of don't know why. I would note as a footnote that, you know, a year and a half or so ago it came out that the you know, the state …”
Rey Flemings: Eliminating multi-generational wealth inheritance would solve massive societal problems
“It would solve a massive amount of the problems.”
Kelly: AI will never escape human control
“I don't believe AI is ever going to be out of our control in the sense of, yes, I mean, there may be occasions when it does something, but we're going to be quick to correct it and say, no, no.”
Kelly: Bottom-up neural nets will never achieve full AI without top-down control
“That bottom up
Will take you much further than you thought you could go, but will never take you all the way to where you want to go. So Wikipedia, this classic bottom-up thing, over time, there's a more and more top-down editorial control, and eventually, ov…”
Kelly: AI-based religions will inevitably emerge first in China and Russia
“It would not surprise me to see
Some new religions based around AI emerging in the kind of vacuum of the waning of the established religions.
And let me say one last thing.
And I would expect it to see these first in China and maybe Russia because they have a …”
Karp: I fully reversed degenerative blindness in two months via lifestyle changes
“After about two months of this my vision started coming back, and nobody believed it, and thankfully, there was an empirical test that the ophthalmologist can do, That basically can show the progression of your blindness. It's not like, do you see, do you not …”
Karp: Totino's Pizza Rolls contain over 70 ingredients and banned chemicals
“Totino's has an ingredient label that's over 70 seven zero ingredients long. It doesn't even use real cheese. It actually says on the label imitation cheese. It has at least a dozen chemicals that are banned in other countries that are in the ingredient label.”
Karp: Anyone paying for streaming or Starbucks can afford healthy food
“It's a myth that only people with money can afford healthy food and the reason it's a myth is because we've looked at the data, and it's a choice. So what I mean by that is anyone who has a smartphone, right, and you have to separate people who are below the p…”
Manned spaceflight is a reality TV show with no functional purpose
“I mean, today, the manned space flight is a reality TV show. And in fact, the cutting edge of manned space flight is space tourism. That's what Blue Origin and SpaceX and others are gearing up for, and there's just no reason to take a fragile human up there.”
Globally, society is doing effectively nothing to address climate change
“Currently we're doing, to first order approximation, exactly nothing for climate change.”
Natural gas produces more net global warming than coal
“Natural gas actually produces more global warming in almost every case than coal.”
Driving a Tesla on the US East Coast actively hurts the climate
“If you drive a Tesla and you live in the East Coast of the United States, statistically speaking, you're hurting the climate, not helping it.”
Software systems design is 100 years ahead of traditional corporate management
“Engineering involves applied systems design. It has a discipline of systems design that is just vastly, like, we're not talking about slightly ahead. We're talking about a hundred years ahead in, in, in, to everything else. It is not a contest when you hold it…”
Legacy media holds a structural grudge against technology due to disruption
“Media has a grudge against technology for, frankly, understandable reasons. Like everyone in media works for an institution that probably was negatively affected by tech.”
Lütke: Anti-Nuclear Environmentalism Drove Global Reliance on Fossil Fuels
“A lot of our carbon issue in the world comes from the environmentalists convincing the world that even though we're building a
economy that required nuclear power, we could somehow do it with coal instead, and oil.”
The European energy crisis sparked by Russia may solve climate change
“Europe's dependence on Russia for natural gas pipelines plus the act of aggression by Russia may actually cause climate change to be solved, which is, like, an unbelievable story when you're looking at this.”
The adage 'hire smart people and get out of their way' is ineffective
“Hire smart people and then get out of their way. I think that's a waste of everyone's time. It's not even good for the, like, it's a nice story, but it's, like, dumb. It's, like, one of those would be nice if that would work, but doesn't.”
The next generation of humans will definitively achieve biological immortality
“Hey, the future's fantastic, and we'll probably become immortal relatively soon, and all these kind of things and maybe not us, but our children definitely will.”
Parrish: Remote workers will end up working for in-office colleagues
“Oh, I just said the people who don't go back to the office are going to end up working for the people that do.”
Stanley: Dismissing experts' subjective sense of 'interesting' cripples innovation
“It's actually the subjective judgments are the interesting ones because, like, the objective judgments are easy. You don't need a degree to just measure something. You know, some kid takes some test, you get a score. You can average them across everybody at th…”
Stanley: Direct pursuit of human-level AI is a naive objective
“Like, at some level, there's, like, this really grandiose conception of, like, some human-like computer, and, like, that is, I think, a naive objective right now. Like, you just don't want to know how to do that. We don't know what the stepping stones are that…”
Klein: Debiasing fails because cognitive biases are effective learned heuristics
“I know my sense from the literature is that there's been little of any success in de-biasing people, and I think that's a good thing because the biases that get identified Are essentially related to the heuristics that we've learned and are part of the experie…”
Kunal Shah: India's Per Capita Income Growth Will Never Match China's
“And therefore, a lot of Western markets love to come to India and say, oh, India is the next China. It's not, because our per capita income is never going to beat and grow like China, because before China started becoming affluent, 96% of Chinese urban women w…”
Sinclair: Research Shows Interventions Can Make an 80-Year-Old Biologically 60
“We're keeping animals and increasingly we're showing with people that you can keep them younger for longer so that when you're 80, you can actually be 60.”
Sinclair: Data Shows Carnivore Diet Does Not Promote Long-Term Longevity
“I'm convinced and the data shows it from population studies that a carnivorous diet isn't a longevity producing diet in the long run, right?”
Sinclair: Someone Born Today Will Live to Be 150 Years Old
“But I do think that somebody born today
We'll live that long because the technology is just going so quickly.”
Balaji: US is headed toward anarchy rather than totalitarian dictatorship
“For some time, I'd been increasingly concerned that instead of marching into a future of freedom, we were heading into a time of tyranny. I still think something like this may take place in China's sphere of influence. Arguably, it already has. But as the even…”
Balaji: Canada's financial crackdown on truckers was an unprecedented PR disaster
“Yes, Canada did implement these unprecedented financial controls. Yes, it did affect these, you know, truckers, but because they were unable to successfully censor social media, Canada suffered probably the gravest PR disaster that I've ever seen in my life.”
Srinivasan: Most Core Math and Physics Breakthroughs Predate the NSF
“The vast majority Of, you know, results in mathematics and physics and so on that we rely on happened before NSF. Okay. Let's say like they predate the modern scientific establishment that Vannevar Bush set up”
Balaji: Tech labs will raise more funding via crypto than grants
“And any lab that is like doing reasonably interesting technology work. Absolutely. Will probably be able to get more funding online via cryptocurrency and NFTs than they will within the academic grants process.”
Balaji: Western elites inherited a system they could never build
“They inherited a system from their ancestors that they could never have built. And they just assume that this thing, which is at massive scale, they can sanction this person and sanction this person and attack this person and de-platform this person and so on …”
Balaji: Western institutions are retrofitting speech controls onto a free society
“What they're doing is they're retrofitting speech and thought controls onto a previously free society.”
US attempt to institute internet censorship is too late compared to China
“The Chinese sort of bought censorship at the seed stage or series a stage and the U S establishment has tried to institute censorship at like the post IPO stage. Okay. Which is 1000 X or 10,000 X or a 100,000 X the cost. After three billion people have gotten,…”
Balaji Srinivasan: Governments will fail to ban crypto as elites profit
“Like, they're not going to be able to ban it now. It's going to be harder to ban it. If enough members of the elite have sort of defected and are making money from this, only the sort of retro authoritarian chunk, which is Only about 30% of the population. It'…”
Srinivasan: Modern ideological America is distinct from historic America like Soviet Russia
“Woke America is to America as Soviet Russia is to Russia. Like, it's like a different thing, you know? It's like an ideological different thing.”
Srinivasan: The Permanent US Government Is Unelected Bureaucrats, Media, and Academics
“So the actual government is what remains constant through elections. And that's, you know, the official bureaucracy of, you know, about three million federal employees, many of whom have career tenure. And if so, they were not elected and can't be fired. Okay.…”
Srinivasan: A Country is Operationally a Democracy Only If Bitcoin Is Legal
“It's a operationally a democracy if Bitcoin is legal, because then you've got freedom to exit with your money and freedom to transact. And if Bitcoin is not legal, Or if it's restricted, then it's a limited democracy or flawed democracy or non-democracy. Becau…”
Balaji Srinivasan: Wealth heirs adopt socialism to gain status and stifle competition
“A lot of them actually fall into socialism because they didn't work for their money. Right. Their life experience is that every, they were just born rich and other people were born poor. And it's just like a, you know, so then also there's another aspect, whic…”
Balaji: Remote tools and Web3 make childhood work safe and viable again
“Lots of kids are able to make money at home. Okay. So the quote child labor issue where somebody is in a factory and they're being oppressed by a boss and the parent can't see them and they're like, their little fingers are being worked off. All that goes away…”
Srinivasan: Geopolitics by 2040 may center on China vs. international Indians
“I think by 2040, there's a chance, I'm not saying a hundred percent, but I think that if the last century ended up at least the second half was USA versus USSR, right? I think this century may end up as being China versus Indians, not India. I think that's whe…”
Srinivasan: US will collapse as an empire like the Soviet Union did
“I think the transition from just like the USSR became Russia, I think the USA after whatever collapse becomes America. That say it's like American culture. It's baseball, it's hot dogs, but it's not global empire, right?”
Meta is extremely underrated because Mark Zuckerberg remains founder and CEO
“Because Facebook still has its founder and that's the most important thing. Like Zuck will take the hits of pushing them into new territory, even with the five hundred billion dollar markdown or whatever that they just had. Like I'm still more bullish on them …”