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
Cialdini: McDonald's Families Bought 25% More Food When Given Balloons First
“The other half, each kid got the balloon as they entered. Those families bought 25% more food because they had been given something first.”
Cialdini: Tailored Free Gifts Boosted Fast-Food Purchases by 24%
“Researchers did a study. People came in, and one-third of them just went to the to the counter and ordered their food. Another third of them came in and were given a very attractive key ring with a beautiful medallion on it by the management. Oh, thank you for…”
Cialdini: 6,700-Site Study Found Scarcity of Supply Top Conversion Driver
“There was a study of 6700 E-commerce sites and A-B tests that were done for various components inside those sites. Does the site have free delivery? Does the site have a search function? Does every appeal end with a call to action? They had 29 of those. The to…”
Isaacson: Josiah Zayner Sells CRISPR Materials Online Through The Odin
“Josiah Zainer,
Runs a store called the Odin, and you can go online and get CRISPR and use CRISPR maybe to regulate the myostatin, so you'll have bigger muscles, things like that.”
Conant: Campbell Soup replaced 300 of its top 350 leaders during turnaround
“We turned over 300 of the top 350 leaders in the company. Six out of seven.”
Danny Meyer: Restaurant prices will rise as tipped wages disappear
“And as cities, states, and now the entire country move to a higher minimum wage, and then perhaps one day, one wage for everybody, as opposed to a second-tier For tipped employees, which I believe is not gonna last forever. Can't. You're gonna start to see res…”
Hertz: One in five millennials has zero friends
“One in five millennials Don't have a single friend.”
Hertz: Stanford study showed deactivating Facebook reduces loneliness and increases socializing
“And there was a landmark study that was carried out by Stanford University about a year and a half ago, a real gold standard of a study where they had 3000 participants, 1500 in a control group, and the other 1500 were expressly charged to go off, in this case…”
Hertz: Lonely people are 30% more likely to die prematurely
“That's why loneliness, it turns out, is if you're lonely, 30% more likely to die prematurely than if you're not”
Hertz: Loneliness under two years significantly raises early death risk
“What's worrying is that even relatively short periods of loneliness, so even periods of loneliness under two years, Researchers have found can significantly increase your likelihood of an early death.”
Hertz: Open-plan offices cause workers to withdraw and use email more
“Surprisingly, open plan offices actually make people really socially withdraw, maybe not that surprisingly, so panopticon so noisy, people tend to withdraw, communicate more on email.”
Greenblatt: A basket of 299 unprofitable billion-dollar companies gained over 100%
“There are now 299 companies that lost money in 2019. So this is pre-COVID. So there were money losers in 2019 with a market cap now over a billion dollars. And if you bought every single one of those money losers, those 299 companies with market caps over a bi…”
Greenblatt: Success Academy's low-income students outperform New York's wealthiest districts
“There are now 20,000 kids in 47 schools, and they would be the top district in New York City, and most of the kids 87% are minority low income. Kids. And yet they beat all the wealthiest school districts.”
McGonigal: Violent crime declined while video game playtime skyrocketed
“Video games, the number of people and the hours that we've spent playing them has skyrocketed, and yet violent crime has gone down almost on the same curve, and so it's just, it's like completely ludicrous, and nobody actually believes it increases violence.”
McGonigal: My 2008 and 2010 Games Forecast the 2019 Respiratory Pandemic
“Two of my biggest games, one in 2008, and one in 2010, forecast big respiratory pandemics that started in China for the year 2019 and 2020”
Holland: Huawei clearly used leaked Cisco intellectual property in 2003–2004
“It was back in 2003, 2004, but there was a very clear cut case that Huawei was using conveniently leaked intellectual property.”
McLean: Fortune's Enron takedown originated from short seller Jim Chanos' tip
“But this piece, nonetheless, which started when a guy named Jim Chanos, who many people know, he's one of the longest-running short sellers out there, came to me and said, how does Enron make money? Tell me if you can figure it out.”
McLean: Lloyd Blankfein Told FT He Did Not Consider Himself Well-Off
“The Financial Times did a really good interview with Lloyd Blankfein, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs. It was a couple of months ago, maybe a month ago, and Blankfein said in that interview that he didn't consider himself particularly well off.”
Ackman: Herbalife runs paid Google ads targeting my name
“Herbalife is still running a negative campaign about me personally, which I find fairly remarkable. The way you can see this is if you Google my name I don't know if you want to do this right now. What will pop up is an advertisement And it, the advertisement …”
Ackman: Herbalife settled with SEC for $20M over China disclosures
“In the last six months, and you can Google it, Herbalife paid, settled with the SEC for twenty million dollars for misleadingly describing their China business and their public finance, because it actually, the compensation scheme is precisely the same as, and…”
Calacanis: Asana Has Built a Much Bigger Business Than Basecamp
“I forgot the name of it because it's no longer the biggest player in that space. Like there's other people like Asana who've built like much bigger businesses, but you know, they decided they wanted to build a profitable lifestyle business.”
Srinivasan: COVID-19 Total Hospitalizations and Deaths Will Exceed Ebola Due to Scale
“It's nowhere near as lethal as Ebola, but its scale is likely to be much higher than Ebola.
And so the total number of people hospitalized or killed by it may be much larger.”
Balaji: Wuhan hospital overload and lockdown prove COVID is far worse than flu
“Wuhan was a normal city on December first of last year, and by January 23rd, all seven hospitals were filled. People were being sent home to die. The entire city was put under quarantine, and it was, you know, the largest, like, you know, quarantine in human h…”
Pasricha: Decision-making energy is only replenished by sleep or glucose
“They say when you're done with your decision-making energy, there's only two ways to replenish it. Number one is sleep, and number two is glucose, or anything that turns into glucose in your body.”
Kahneman: Insurance underwriters varied by 50% on identical cases, defying 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 their premium, divide that by the average premium. What number do you get? And people…”
Nagoski: No scientific evidence shows open relationships are better or worse than monogamy
“Yeah, there isn't any evidence one way about them being better or worse. They're just a different relationship structure.”
Nagoski: Historically, sexual frequency showed no statistical link to pregnancy rates
“Almost none of the sex humans have ever had
Is reproductive. Even before there was hormonal contraception, there was not a statistically significant relationship between frequency of sex and number of pregnancies.”
Empathic Discipline Intervention Cut Student Suspension Rates by 50%
“And that exercise reduced the suspension rate among students whose teachers got that message by 50% over the school year.”
Guided Reframing Interventions Dramatically Reduced Child Abuse and Maternal Depression
“What Bugenthal found was that this exercise dramatically reduced the rates of what she called harsh parenting, like things like spanking and other kinds of physical acts that, that you could think of as a child sort of maltreatment within the first year of lif…”
Children infer mindset from parents' reactions to mistakes, not abstract beliefs
“Kids tend to draw strong inferences from their parents' reactions to mistakes. So Kyla's work began with a very curious observation, which was that the correlation between kids' Parents' beliefs about the malleability of intelligence and their parents' beliefs…”
A 21-Minute Writing Intervention Halted the Downward Trend in Marital Satisfaction
“What that study showed was that there was an overall, a slow decline over time in marital quality. People, as time went by, felt less close, less intimate, less passionate, less satisfied in their marriages. And as I understand it, that's a common finding in l…”
Howey: Amazon halves self-publishing royalties outside the $2.99 to $9.99 range
“They think eBooks should be between two 99 and nine 99. And if you price it there, they'll give you a 70%. If you price it below two 99, Hey, you're welcome to do that. But they're going to pay you 35%, which is half. If you price it over nine 99, again, your …”
Johnson: Survey Data Shows People in Exclusive Relationships Report the Best Sex
“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.”
Haidt: US teen suicide is up 25% for boys, 70% for girls
“The rates of self-harm, that is kids who are hospitalized because they cut themselves, that, that's for girls only. Boys are not changing on that. That goes way up in the same pattern, and then it's also suicide. The boys' suicide rate in the United States is …”
DuckDuckGo Studies Found Location-Biased Search Results for Political Queries
“We've done several studies on political terms and people in different areas are seeing completely different results when you search for things like gun control or political candidate name or something like that.”
Google Tracks 80% of the Top Million Websites; Facebook Tracks 25%
“Google's on about 80% of the top million sites and a lot of that's Google Analytics, but also, like the Google Ads and stuff like that. Facebook's on 25% and that's this Facebook pixel where it could be the Facebook login, or just sites run Facebook ads, or th…”
Wolfe: Users will soon control ambient technology using neural micro-gesture wristbands
“What that implies is that you will wear something akin to a bracelet or a wristwatch, and you will be able to gesture like Disney's Sorcerer's Apprentice to flick your fingers to turn on the lights, to swipe like you would swipe in three dimensional, three Rai…”
Robinson: AlphaZero surpassed all human chess knowledge within four hours
“And in four hours, that program leapfrogged all existing human knowledge of the game, and has a chess rating of, hard to estimate, like, 36, 3700, compared with 3300.”
Coloroso: Nineteen US states still legally permit corporal punishment in schools
“We still have 19 states in this country that allow corporal punishment.”
Gawande: High-volume Toronto hernia clinic outperformed trained surgeons at lower cost
“One of my very first article was about a computer that could diagnose heart attacks better than better than the most experienced doctor could, and a hernia factory in Toronto where the surgeons were, none of them were actually trained as surgeons. One was like…”
Gawande: Core operational management practices directly improve hospital patient outcomes
“We now see that there is direct correlation between the more of that you do, the better off patients are, substantially better off patients are, and better off in terms of quality.”
Gawande: Only 25% of seriously ill patients discuss quality-of-life goals
“We're at 25% Of people who have a serious life-limiting illness in the last year and have been hospitalized, only 25% have had that conversation about their goals and priorities for their quality of life with their clinician.”
Gawande: Palliative Care Conversations Extended Lung Cancer Patients' Lives by 25%
“Including a randomized trial at the Mass General Hospital with stage four lung cancer patients who all died in the course of care. And when they had conversations with a palliative care expert about their goals for their quality of life, The result was that th…”
Collison: Tokyo kept housing costs stable through minimal supply restrictions
“Tokyo has over the last couple of decades, been an improbable, well, not especially improbable, but has been such an enormous economic success story. And, you know, you had the boom and the bust and the supposed stagnation of Japan in the kind of early ninetie…”
Oakley: Neuroscience proves math mastery requires practice and repetition
“When it comes to math, it's like, ah, let's not talk about how the neuroscience supports the fact that you also need practice and repetition for math, because it, then you start getting into the math wars.”
Oakley: Karpicke study shows active recall outperforms rereading and concept mapping
“There's a great study by Jeff Karpicki of Purdue about where he showed what is the best way to learn if you're reading, for example, a complex paper on some scientific study or subject. The best way is you read it, and then you look away, and you can, you see …”
Oakley: Human working memory holds roughly four slots, not seven
“We used to think there are seven slots in working memory, so it's like seven things you can hold in mind. Like seven numbers. That's why, you know, it was four, five, three, seven, two, three, nine, or whatever phone number had seven digits in it, because they…”
Machiavellian Tactics Succeed in One-Shot Deals but Fail Long-Term
“There are measures of Machiavellianism, and you, if you're a Machiavellian, you know, and you lie and manipulate and don't mind really harming people to rise in power, you'll do well in one-shot negotiations, but for the most part, you don't do too well in ris…”