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 36 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 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
Balaji Srinivasan: Western governments will lose battle against decentralized network elite
“And I think that Western governments will lose. It's going to be super nasty and super gnarly, but on balance, they will lose because their ideology is not one that attracts the very top talent.”
Srinivasan: Bitcoin Is on Track to Become the 'Government of Governments'
“Bitcoin, the reason I say Bitcoin specifically is it's, you know, it's on track. We will see if it can actually get there. Cause it's got various kinds of issues, you know, privacy and other kinds of things that, you know, but It's on track to be the governmen…”
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…”
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 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: 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?”
San Francisco pedestrians routinely inhale and track aerosolized fecal matter indoors
“In many cities on the coast of the US, like San Francisco most infamously, you are definitely, people are definitely inhaling fecal matter as they're walking outside. They're definitely getting it on their shoes and so on and tracking it in, even in, like, sma…”
The pandemic will permanently shift tech to a primary remote work model
“So what this is going to do is it's going to force everybody to look at remote work as not a auxiliary,
But as a primary, this is what I, one of the grand challenges I think for tech as opposed to biotech to work on, and it's going to have its hands full buil…”
Srinivasan: Woke ideology cannot win in pseudonymous crypto environments
“That army of wokeness, that ideology can win on like, you know, centralized social media platforms, English internet. But once you start going pseudonymous, once you start having cryptocurrency involved, once you start Going international and having people abr…”
Robotic construction will hyper-deflate building costs and assemble prefabs rapidly
“In the not infinitely distant future you will have the ability to just hit enter on a computer and have a bunch of robots snap together a prefab building. With perfect speed in the rain, you know, in eight hours, perfect site, all of that stuff, right? Some of…”
Robotics will make physical goods cheap, shifting status-seeking entirely digital
“With robots, the physical world should get super cheap. Eventually. And then all status seeking goes to the optional digital world.”
Balaji Srinivasan: Web3 services rivaling US tech giants will emerge in India
“I think you're going to see a whole parallel set of services arise that are the peers of the American tech companies, but in web three in India over the next 10 years, I think it's going to be one of the least anticipated things that's going to happen”
Balaji Srinivasan: Trump de-platforming leads to national stacks and neutral protocols
“So what happens is that the platform of Trump has set off a cascade of things that will lead to National stacks and neutral protocols.”
Balaji Srinivasan: India will become a tech and media superpower
“This is why I think if China becomes, has become a tech and manufacturing superpower, I think India becomes a tech and media superpower.”
CDC's early COVID-19 PCR test failed due to bugs across three loci
“The actual CDC test looks at this, not just for one locus, but for three loci, meaning three different spots on the virus's genome. One of those spots, I believe, is for all coronavirus, and two loci are specific to this SARS-CoV-CoV-II virus, the virus that c…”
China will build a 'Great Biowall' for continuous pathogen surveillance
“There's a great wall of China, the great firewall, and I think we're going to see the great By the wall of China, okay, where, you know, they'll be sequencing and testing the heck out of everybody, scanning the country constantly to see, okay, is a virus risin…”
International travel will require real-time biological screening before boarding
“Now that's going to go to real time, meaning, you know, within a day or an hour before you get on the flight, you know, imagine a next generation TSA that was actually competent, you know, in, in, in countries around the world, which Needs your biological info…”
Diagnostic and imaging companies will receive defense-level funding post-pandemic
“This is going to be a gigantic shot in the arm for every diagnostic company in the world, every medical imaging company, all of those are about to get, like, defense budget level spending.”
Balaji: COVID-19 case volume overwhelms healthcare systems despite mild cases
“All the evidence we have indicates that the absolute number of hospitalizations and deaths when this hits an area is very high. Even if it is true there's lots and lots of mild cases, the N is so large that it overwhelms the medical system.”
Balaji: Many hardware companies will die from Chinese supply chain disruptions
“Hardware companies are just going to die, many of them, because they just can't get the parts from Chinese warehouses.”
FDA bureaucracy blocked US coronavirus testing throughout February 2020
“Net-net a bureaucratic process inhibited the United States from testing for a critical 30 day-ish period from January to February and gave people a false sense of security that there weren't that many coronavirus cases in the U.S.”
The CDC was bottlenecked to running only 12 coronavirus tests per day
“CDC itself was doing 12 tests a day, and that basically meant, you know, for a country of three hundred million people that's testing 12 a day, that's a centralized bottleneck.”
Balaji: Society faces an unbundling of institutions before rebundling
“Prior to any rebundling, I think we're on track for quite the unbundling.”
Srinivasan: Practical speech will expand despite institutional attempts to suppress it
“It's like a graph that went all the way up into the right in terms of practical speech. And then they're trying to like jacket back down, but it's going to come back up because the attempt to deprive somebody of the practical, right? You just gave them that vo…”
Srinivasan: China's Three Red Lines policy intentionally engineered Evergrande's controlled demolition
“In China, actually, Xi Jinping has talked about how he did not want houses to be used for investment. And actually that's part of their policy there is to try to intentionally pop the bubble rather than having a bear or Lehman type thing. Evergrande was like a…”
Balaji Srinivasan: Most English internet users will be Indian
“Most English speakers on the internet are going to be Indian.”
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…”
Srinivasan: First COVID-19 infections likely began in November 2019
“If your first case is December first, the person probably got infected in November, then things started compounding from there.”
Srinivasan: Diagnostic PCR and sequencing are standard tech, contagion is main testing hurdle
“People have been doing RT-PCR, and they've been doing sequencing on aluminum machines for basically a decade plus at this point. The main difficulty here is that the SARS-CoV-I virus is very contagious and dangerous, so you need to be even more careful with sa…”
Srinivasan: Continuous temperature-tracking wearables like Oura will become mainstream
“I mean, I, I'm not an investor in Oura or anything like that, but I know that it's pretty cool, where it does monitor your body temperature over time. Something like that, I think, will become very mainstream.”
Srinivasan: Wuhan's 40,000-family banquet caused COVID-19 cases to surge vertically
“Wuhan had a gathering of 40,000 families, which is a really big thing, right? And that's a great way to just take something that was a viral fire and just make it go completely vertical.”
Srinivasan: Faulty Sewage Caused 300 SARS Infections at Amoy Gardens
“There's a famous, infamous case of a apartment complex in Hong Kong called Imoy Gardens, and about 300 people there contracted SARS because, you know, it gave some of them diarrhea, and this is gross, but, you know, some of them flushed, and the sewage system …”