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
Dr. Sue Johnson: Pursuit of Sexual Novelty Stems From Emotional Numbness
“You need novelty when you're numbed out and shut down, and you need more and more novel sensation to have you get turned on. That's the way I see it. Novelty is about how we've numbed out our sexuality. Not how, no, it's not about freedom.”
Johnson: 70% of North American therapists see couples without specialized training
“The fact of the matter is, 70% of mental health professionals in North America Say they see couples now, because the demand is huge, and most of those people have not been trained in couples therapy.”
Johnson: Teaching couples to 'fight fair' is irrelevant rubbish
“Therapists focus on conflict, teach you how to fight. Fair, and fighting fair is rubbish, ok? It's like, It's irrelevant. It's, you know, it's, so, you know and we don't look at what's going on underneath, which is lack of emotional connection.”
Haidt: Campus victimhood culture awards social status for weakness and victimization
“They say reflects a new moral culture in which you achieve status, not by being strong, not by being beautiful, not by being smart. You achieve status by being, by emphasizing how much you've been victimized, and if you haven't been victimized, then you achiev…”
Haidt: Modern fragility and speech norms make Gen Z bad workplace cooperators
“It's that they've been raised with a set of norms. That's really bad for them. That makes them very bad cooperators. And if you can't cooperate, you can't be employed.”
Haidt: A child would wait 700,000 years in a car before abduction
“There are about a hundred people, a hundred kids abducted a year in the United States by strangers. At present rates of abduction, you'd have to leave your kid alone in a car in a parking lot for 700,000 years before they would probably be abducted.”
Haidt: Academic classrooms must not be safe spaces
“Our argument has always been that the classroom must not be a safe space, that classrooms must be places where any claim will be challenged, not Not attacked not shamed, but counterarguments backed by evidence will be given.”
Gross: YouTube is more important to Google than web search
“I actually believe YouTube is more important to Google than web search if they're thinking about it properly, but that's an acquired asset.”
Gross: Global problems stem from capitalism's short-term outlook
“I think you can trace almost Every major problem that we have in the world today to the fact that capitalism has a very short term outlook. So it maximizes for what is good today, not what is great 10 years from now.”
Gross: Both Marxist communism and Bitcoin are awful things
“Whether it's awful things, in my opinion, like say, you know, Marxist communism or Bitcoin, it always goes through this world.”
Fried: Uber is held up as successful but is a fundamentally terrible business
“I have a hard time though sometimes with tech businesses that are quote successful or held up as successful examples of businesses that are actually fundamentally terrible businesses. I think like things like companies like Uber is an example.”
Markham: Children face higher abuse risks when an unrelated male moves in
“When a new man comes on the scene in a child's life, a new man is now with their mother, their risk of being abused or in fact being killed in childhood goes up.”
Wolfe: Childless CEOs over 50 tend to be overly controlling operators
“I have a really politically incorrect one, which is older CEOs that by choice, not biologically, because there's a big difference, never had children. I find that for whatever reason, they tend to be very controlling. Now, my sample size here is like five of f…”
AI Will Exponentially Exceed Human Intelligence in Hours in New Domains
“Now imagine that computer is unleashed not in the domain of chess, but in other domains. It'll totally recreate everything we know and then go beyond it in hours. So the scary thing with AI is this, that it will become exponentially smarter than we are in minu…”
Robinson: Palo Alto Has the Highest Teenage Suicide Rate in the US
“Of all the cities in the United States, the one with the highest teenage suicide rate is Palo Alto, which is tax central, right?”
Robinson: Parental Birthplace Eliminated Racial Differences in Test Score Gains
“If your father was born in another country, and your mother was born in the United States, that student improved the same regardless of race. Race dropped out as a factor.”
Gawande: Spinal surgery for pain provides no average benefit at nine months
“In, ah, back surgery, we have a bunch of studies showing that when you do back surgery for pain, spinal, spinal surgery for pain as opposed for, as opposed to for neurological symptoms where you have actual nerve damage. But when it's for pain, the average peo…”
Cowen: Most of Eastern Europe is depopulating and will never catch up
“Parts of the world, such as Eastern Europe you know, Poland maybe is catching up to the West, but most of it is being depopulated and emptying out. And it basically will never catch up.”
Greene: Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs was rushed and shallow.
“You know, I like Walter Isaacson. I think he's a very fine biographer, but You know, even like the Steve jobs that he's rushed, he's got to write it because she just died. And like, I don't really feel like when I read that book, I understand the man, Steve jo…”
Collison: Tech workers moving to low-cost regions will be less productive
“Because of the sort of the collision of ideas and people in cities makes them more productive than if they were elsewhere. If you believe that to be the case, and there's like pretty good empirical data that it is, then it, you can't just move elsewhere. You c…”
Oakley: Research Shows Visual and Auditory Learning Styles Are Scientifically Groundless
“There was a excellent study done by a woman named Beth Rogoski and what she did was she took one of the standard tests to kind of analyze a very widely used test that is used to distinguish an individual as to whether they're a visual learner or an auditory le…”
Chris Voss: 'Getting to Yes' fails because humans make decisions emotionally
“Getting to yes is intellectually sound. There's nothing intellectually to be challenged on getting to yes. And unfortunately, that does you no good as soon as you involve human beings because none of us are intellectually sound.”
Chris Voss: BATNA is a horrible negotiation strategy that leaves money on the table
“An intellectually brilliant idea in practice, a horrible idea... Here's, here's the problem with Batman. That becomes your goal, and so therefore, if you say to yourself, and the vast majority of people who calculate their BATNA, you know, as long as I do bett…”
Nutrition Research Lowered Its Standards Due to the Difficulty of Human Trials
“Very difficult, if not impossible, to do right, and so what the nutrition and public health research communities did is they just lowered their standards for what they would consider reliable knowledge, and this just became sort of, ah, inculcated throughout t…”
The Medical Community Has No Idea How to Solve the Obesity Epidemic
“And, you know, we end up in a situation today where we have, you know, these massive, unprecedented epidemics of obesity and diabetes and related diseases, and the medical public health community has no idea, almost literally no idea what to do about it, and e…”
Explaining Obesity With Calories Is Like Explaining Wealth With Dollars
“This idea that excess calories is what makes us fat, Is the, and I, I'm embarrassed that I ever, never thought of this before. It's logically equivalent to saying, you know, excess money makes us rich. Or I don't know, scoring excess points in a football game …”
Chronic Metabolic Disease Stems From Refined Foods, Not a Lack of Fiber
“You add fiber, you can slow down the digestion of the carbohydrates. You can even slow down the digestion of the sugars. So that would probably help, but you've paid attention to the wrong thing. It's not the absence of the fiber. It's the presence of those ot…”
Taubes Admits His Own Nutrition Science Initiative Did More Harm Than Good
“And if anything, at this point in time, we have done more harm than good.”
Type 2 Diabetes Is Reversible Without Drugs via Low-Carb Diets
“Even type two diabetes was irreversible. Once on insulin, always on insulin, basically, until you get taken down by the side effects. And now people are showing that on these diets, and maybe others as well, but they're showing that this is a reversible diseas…”
Computers will surpass humans at quality thinking long before intuition
“It'll be a long time before those intuitions and those imaginations are created by computers. Ok, but it won't be a long time before computers produce better quality thinking.”
Grant: Exact replications in social science are nearly impossible to achieve
“The odds that you're going to find the exact same effect with a different group of people who don't have an identical distribution of traits are pretty close to zero in my opinion.”
Sutherland: Economics is creatively limiting by reducing motivation to bribes and fines
“The problem of economics isn't only that it's wrong, it's that it's incredibly creatively limiting, because it tends to posit a very one-dimensional view of human motivation, and therefore, if you wish to change human behavior, the only two ways you can do it …”
Sutherland: Shareholder value short-termism creates psychopathic, untrusted businesses
“And I think the problem with the shareholder value movement, by the way, and short term targets in business, is you're creating in businesses with a focus on the short term, you're creating psychopathic businesses, you're creating businesses which consumers in…”
Ravikant: No one reaches enlightenment or does serious internal work in groups
“Nobody reaches enlightenment or internal happiness or does serious internal work in group settings. It is a very lonely kind of task. And so to some extent, I think that people who are constantly looking for social affirmation in their internal work, aren't th…”
Naval Ravikant dismisses macroeconomics as corrupted politics lacking scientific falsifiable predictions.
“Macroeconomics is a combination of voodoo complex systems and politics. And you can find macroeconomists to take every side of every argument. So I think that discipline, because it doesn't make falsifiable predictions, which is the hallmark of science, becaus…”
Naval Ravikant: Belief in the technological Singularity is a religion for nerds.
“I think it's religion for nerds. You know, it's got all the same characteristics. It's unfalsifiable until it happens. It basically says the chosen ones will be saved. The world's gonna end. You know, we will be immortal. It's very hard to tell apart from a
Ex…”
Naval: Humanity is no closer to general AI than 20 years ago
“We are no closer to creating a general AI. I think that we were 20 years ago.”
Domingos: Doctors Gatekeep Medical AI to Prevent Automating Their Own Jobs
“In the particular case of medicine, it's not used more already because, of course, the doctors are also the gatekeepers Of the system, and they're not very interested in replacing themselves or their job that they like best by machines.”
Domingos: AI Will Plateau Rather Than Experiencing Infinite Runaway Intelligence Growth
“And I think they will be in the case of AI, but I don't think we're going to see this, you know, infinite growth that, you know, goes completely beyond you know, what humans can imagine.”
Zweig: The best investors often possess an autistic-spectrum emotional detachment
“A lot of the best investors Have that sort of touch of something on the autistic spectrum. It's a little bit of detachment from other people's emotions that enables them to stand back and look and observe what other people are feeling and say, that's funny. Wh…”
Zweig: Venture capital valuations ramp up without properly accounting for dilution
“They set their own valuations, and there's also a disturbing wrinkle in that the valuations sort of as a new round of capital comes in that ramps up the valuation without accounting for dilution the same way you would in a public company. And I think that's ve…”
Baszucki predicts users will eventually create video games entirely via voice
“But getting to the point where you or I make a beautiful thing, share it with our family, play it just by talking about it, I think is going to come true as well.”
Jacobs: Kurzweil is probably right that human-technology merger will create new species
“Ray predicts a singularity whereby technology becomes more intelligent, more capable than humans, and we merge with technology, that we use so much technology in our own bodies, with wearables, and nanobots, and so forth, that, and AI, and outsourcing our memo…”
Jacobs: Sensible M&A creates massive shareholder value with unmatched certainty
“I love M&A as a way to create value for shareholders because I don't know of another way on a risk adjusted basis on a certainty level that Is more likely to create massive shareholder value than doing sensible M&A.”
Jacobs: Middle-market PE rollups create unintegrated messes for multiple expansion
“You see a lot of these middle market private equity firms do that. They roll up these small companies. They're doing five, 10, twenty million dollars EBITDA each, and they bat, they just buy a bunch of them, and now they're up to a hundred million or two hundr…”
Jacobs structures executive equity to double-vest above the 85th percentile
“If our shareholder returns are less than 55% or so, I don't want it to vest. If it's 65%, it vests some. If it's 75%, it vests more. If it, if it's 85%, 90%, 95%, I want it to, I want them to make, I want it to double vest.”
Rockefeller Predicted Standard Oil Would Someday Refine All Oil
“The Standard Oil Company will someday refine all of the oil and make all of the barrels.”
Rockefeller: Desperate Competitors Ignorant of Their Costs Are the Most Dangerous
“It is to be remembered that oftentimes the most difficult competition comes not from the strong, intelligent, conservative competitor, but from the man who is holding on by the eyelids, is ignorant of his costs, and anyway has got to keep running or bust.”