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 1,551 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
Haidt: Randomized trials prove quitting social media directly improves mental health
“There are now a number of experiments in which they randomly assign people to get off social media for a few weeks and lo and behold, you see very direct improvements in mental health.”
Haidt: Female teen suicide is at record highs across the Anglosphere
“They're having exactly the same gigantic increase in girls' depression, anxiety, and self-harm and suicide in the US and UK and Canada. We're all at record high levels for teenage, for female teenage suicide. So this is throughout the Anglosphere.”
Weinberg: Google and Facebook hold a duopoly over digital advertising
“In the world, there's a duopoly in digital advertising, and it's Google and Facebook owns basically all the digital advertising on the web, which relates to all this data profiles.”
The New York Times Increased Revenue by Dropping Behavioral Ads in Europe
“Like after GDPR in Europe, the New York Times Decided to ditch all the behavioral advertising and put up contextual advertising only and they increased revenue.”
Google Still Makes the Majority of Its Revenue From Contextual Keyword Ads
“And if you think about it, that's really still what Google does most of the time on Google search because all the search ads are still bid on keywords, right? They're just using your search history in addition to target ads of you on YouTube and Gmail and the …”
Marks: The ongoing U.S. recovery will become the longest in history
“So my guess is that this recovery will set a record for the longest recovery in history. Because of the slowness and the absence of excesses.”
Marks: US Consumers, Not Chinese Exporters, Pay US Import Tariffs
“Chinese don't pay tariffs. Tariffs are paid by consumers of goods. We have collected billions in tariffs from US consumers of Chinese goods.”
Marks: US lost 24M jobs to productivity gains versus 3M to China
“The point is that we have probably lost twenty-four million jobs to increasing productivity over the last 40 years compared to three million that went to China. And it shows you the scope of the problem and the location of the problem. The problem is not China…”
Coloroso: Violent games wire brain pathways connecting violence to pleasure
“It also does something that neurologists have found out, and neuroscience, it creates neural pathways that connect violence with pleasure and rewards, rather than sadness and sympathy and fright.”
Gawande: About 30% of All Healthcare Spending Is Waste
“Estimates are that about 30% of healthcare is waste. It's going to things that are either much higher administrative costs that add no value, or are actual treatments and tests and procedures and drugs that are of no benefit or actively harmful.”
Gawande: Up to 42% of Medicare Patients Receive Non-Beneficial Procedures Annually
“And it turned out that between 25 and 42% of Medicare patients of all Medicare patients, 25 to 42% will have one of those 26 things done to them in any given year.”
Lütke: Entrepreneurship is declining across North America
“Entrepreneurship is actually tanking across North America.”
Streaming will eventually cost consumers exactly as much as their old cable bundles
“What's going to happen is people are going to end up paying about the same amount of money every month they do for content today.
There should be paying different people.
And I think that that's going to be the case.
This idea that there's going to be this, yo…”
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: The poorest people in the US or Canada are in the top 10-15% globally
“Even the very poor in the United States, for example, or Canada, They're still in the richest 10 to 15% of the world's population”
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…”
Abstract dishonesty experiment found identical cheating rates across all countries
“Then Francesca Gino, my friend, said, ah, come to Italy. We'll show you what the Italians can do. The Italians cheated just the same. We tried Turkey. We tried South Africa, Kenya, Germany, Sweden. We tried Portugal. We tried the UK. We tried Canada because th…”
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.”
Leading Medical Textbook Harrison's Ignores Hormonal Mechanisms of Obesity
“The medical textbook, the most seminal textbook, and the Harrison's Principles of Medicine, I think it's called, and the chapter on obesity is written by the, you know, a very, very smart researcher named Jeff Flyer, who just, until recently, was dean of Harva…”
High Fructose Intake Converts Directly to Liver Fat, Driving Insulin Resistance
“By the 19 sixties, the biochemistry had pretty clearly worked out that when you dump fructose on the liver, it converts it to fat. And on the other side, you'd have these insulin resistance researchers saying, hey, insulin resistance seems to be caused by the …”
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…”
Cain: Open Office Interruptions Double Task Completion Times and Impair Thinking
“That they make people less productive because you're so much more likely to be interrupted, and with each interruption, it takes you twice as long to complete your task. And people just psychologically feel kind of invaded because when you feel like you can be…”
Grant: Second and third movers are seven times less likely to fail
“If you look at the entrepreneurship realm, for example, or companies launching new products on average the sort of the settlers as opposed to the pioneers, the second and third movers are about seven times less likely to fail than the first movers.”
Domingos: Machine Learning Algorithms Typically Outperform Human Doctors in Medical Diagnosis
“Machines are remarkably better than human doctors at doing all types of medical diagnosis, not just from x-rays, but from, you know, symptoms, right? You have a patient, you have their symptoms, what is the diagnosis? And even very simple machine learning algo…”
Domingos: A Venture Capital Fund Appointed an Algorithm as a Voting Director
“For example, there's this venture fund recently that announced that one of their directors is now going to be an algorithm. There's seven directors on the board, and one of them's an algorithm. So their algorithm doesn't decide anything all by itself, but it d…”
Rivest: No wine in the world costs over $40 to produce
“There's no single bottle of wine in the world that costs more than about 30 or 40 dollars to produce.”
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: By 2025 remote conversations will probably occur in VR
“I think, you know, in 10 years, we'd be probably having this conversation in virtual reality, and we'd be, you know, looking at each other across the room, and it would feel like we're in the same room.”
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.”
Nejatian: Opendoor halved its operating expenses while maintaining previous transaction volume
“To give you a sense, the last time Opendoor bought as many homes as we bought last quarter, Opendoor's OPEX was more than twice as high.”
Valiante: Self-esteem is not empirically related to excellence
“And while it's important to have a healthy self-esteem, it's not empirically related to excellence in any way, shape, or form.”
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…”
Gurley: AI startups burn an order of magnitude more cash than Uber
“Why Amazon was, you know, they had a big burn rate, but then Uber took it to a new level but now it's had an, they've added a zero.”
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…”
Liemandt: Multiple US states legally mandate teaching strictly at grade level
“There's actually laws in states, various states, that you must teach at grade level. Like, it's illegal for a teacher not to teach at grade level, right?”