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
Schwarzman: Hilton buyout made $12B, the largest profit in PE history
“And that deal turned out to be the biggest profit in private equity history. And I just read some articles somebody wrote which makes you wonder who said we were completely irresponsible doing that because journalists can say anything they feel like. But that …”
Schwarzman: Blackstone's investing makes about double the stock market
“We've just become more popular because the type of investing we do makes about double the stock market.”
Collins: Data shows 10X winners were not luckier than comparison companies
“And then, look at all that data, and what you find, what we found, is that If anything, the comparisons were luckier, but it wasn't strong enough to make that case, so we'll call it a wash. Essentially, if you wanted to argue that the ones who beat their compa…”
The Chitlin Circuit forced Black artists to perform for free
“If you were a black artist and you had a single, you went to Cleveland, you played a concert for a promoter who was a partner with the radio station. They played your record. That's why you went and did it, not to get paid. You did it because if you didn't go,…”
Haidt: Youth born after 1995 face surging anxiety, depression, and self-harm
“Kids born after 1995 have really high rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide.”
Haidt: Adolescent mood disorders surged beginning in 2011, especially among girls
“What they show is a big rise in depression and anxiety only. There's no change in bipolar disorder, schizophrenia no other category. It's just mood disorder, so depression and anxiety. It begins going up around 20 11. It goes up steadily and sharply. It goes, …”
Haidt: Modern working women spend more hours on childcare than 1950s mothers
“There's an amazing statistic we found, that if you look at the total number of hours that women spent doing childcare in the 19 fifties, when very few of them worked outside the home, and you compare that to the total number of hours of childcare that they do …”
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.”
Haidt: Millennials escaped social media harm due to later brain development
“When the millennials got social media in college or later, they weren't damaged by it. There's no sign that millennials had a crisis of mental health, because their social nature was largely, their brains were mostly developed.”
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 …”
Government Surveillance Capacity Has Increased Massively Despite End-to-End Encryption
“If you look at, like, the overall information law enforcement and government has to surveil people, even with end-to-end encryption existing, it's way higher than it was 10 years ago, and way, way higher than it was 20 years ago before.”
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…”
Robinson: Metal traders haven't miscalled interest rate direction this century
“In fact, in the last 18 years, this century, Metal traders haven't been wrong once about the direction of interest rates, either to the upside or the downside.”
Robinson: 80% of NYC Grade-School Test Score Variance Comes From Socioeconomics
“80% of the variation in, in, in fifth grade math and reading scores was attributable to the socioeconomics of the school, not the teachers.”
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.”
Cowen: Minimum wage hikes raise food prices and dissipate initial gains
“So if you raise minimum wages, say that raises food prices, there's good evidence for this, and other poor people have to pay more for their food, And a lot of those apparent first round gains get given back and they dissipate.”
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 top charities achieve up to 1000x more positive impact
“We have some charities that can do, you know, hundreds of thousands of times more good than others which is an amazing opportunity if you are trying to do the most good but at the same time is indicative of the fact that it's just very hard to tell between the…”
MacAskill: Direct Cash Transfers Are Extremely Effective and Often Beat Traditional Aid
“The huge amount of spending goes on, and we don't even know whether that spending, such as buying livestock or providing wells or providing textbooks, is actually having more of an impact than simply giving poor people cash, which is the simplest thing to do. …”
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 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: 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…”
Recruiters secretly prefer hiring candidates who will cheat for the company
“We gave MBAs resumes of potential job candidates. And in those resumes, those people were either told, said that they were, it was said about them that they were either dishonest in their personal lives, like to the significant other. They were dishonest at wo…”
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.”
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 …”
Addicted Lab Rats Will Voluntarily Switch From Cocaine to Sugar
“And in animals at least, so rats and mice, we could do these experiments, you could demonstrate that they are, they will be more addicted to sugar than to cocaine or heroin, so these experiments Experiments, some of them were done in France, are sort of perver…”
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.”
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…”
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: 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…”
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…”
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.”
Galef: Top charities can save 100 times more lives per dollar donated
“They're literally, like, orders of magnitude difference in the effectiveness of different charities trying to do the same thing. So just by kind of stepping back from your automatic emotional reactions and asking yourself, okay, what does the evidence show? Yo…”
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…”