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 21 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
Srinivasan: Centralized Science Post-WWII Became Equivalent to a State Religion
“The bad that came out of it is you built this centralized funnel as opposed to lots of folks with independent power centers and funding sources, figuring out stuff from their own. Instead, you had like a single Thing, which was like official science and offici…”
Balaji: Corporate journalists act as hit men for old money targeting tech
“You know the names of all the tech people, because media corporations are at war with tech companies, and the owners of media corporations are It's not that they get good coverage. They get no coverage. They're just like blotted out, you know, all of this rhet…”
Srinivasan: Child labor laws triggered a long campaign of societal infantilization
“Reasonably, all these child labor laws were passed that essentially began this long campaign of infantilization. And now it's something where you're like on your parents' health insurance till age”
Balaji: Canada's financial crackdown on truckers was an unprecedented PR disaster
“Yes, Canada did implement these unprecedented financial controls. Yes, it did affect these, you know, truckers, but because they were unable to successfully censor social media, Canada suffered probably the gravest PR disaster that I've ever seen in my life.”
Balaji: Western elites inherited a system they could never build
“They inherited a system from their ancestors that they could never have built. And they just assume that this thing, which is at massive scale, they can sanction this person and sanction this person and attack this person and de-platform this person and so on …”
Balaji: Western institutions are retrofitting speech controls onto a free society
“What they're doing is they're retrofitting speech and thought controls onto a previously free society.”
Srinivasan: Modern ideological America is distinct from historic America like Soviet Russia
“Woke America is to America as Soviet Russia is to Russia. Like, it's like a different thing, you know? It's like an ideological different thing.”
Balaji: Remote tools and Web3 make childhood work safe and viable again
“Lots of kids are able to make money at home. Okay. So the quote child labor issue where somebody is in a factory and they're being oppressed by a boss and the parent can't see them and they're like, their little fingers are being worked off. All that goes away…”
Meta is extremely underrated because Mark Zuckerberg remains founder and CEO
“Because Facebook still has its founder and that's the most important thing. Like Zuck will take the hits of pushing them into new territory, even with the five hundred billion dollar markdown or whatever that they just had. Like I'm still more bullish on them …”
Srinivasan: Google is very overrated and 'cruising for a bruising'
“Google, I think is very overrated. It's cruising for a bruising. It'll take a while, but you know, it's possible to get turned around like Microsoft, but that's where they are right now.”
Elites lose trust after repeated intelligence and COVID failures
“Frankly elites don't deserve a lot of trust, you know, because they've messed up so many other things, you know, Like from the, you know, the Afghanistan intelligence, the Iraq intelligence to lots of the early official misinformation on COVID.”
Srinivasan: The West is declining in GDP share, population, and military power
“And now I feel like some reversals notwithstanding, the direction line is down and to the right for the West. It's down to the right as a percentage of global GDP, as a percentage of population and military strength, and so on and so forth.”
Balaji Srinivasan: Chennai is cleaner than San Francisco
“Chennai is cleaner than San Francisco. It's not close. Okay. Like I, there's no question.”
Srinivasan: Google search quality is now quite low for many queries
“Google had this great thing with where it was able to use backlinks as a imperfect measure of search quality. And now they've, you know, lost sight of that, and search quality is actually quite low for many queries, you know, as you've probably seen, right?”
Srinivasan: Putting Scientific Literature On-Chain Has Wikipedia-Level Complexity
“What I'm describing here, by the way, is of the complexity of Wikipedia, but not greater than that. You're basically talking about taking the scientific literature, putting it into truly reproducible research format and putting it on chain such that it's perma…”
Balaji: Rogan cancellation effort showed defenders are now too numerous to cancel
“Crucially, there's a big difference between this versus previous cancellations, which is they could only win it like 55, 45, not like 95, five. How can you see that? Because they couldn't cancel the people defending Rogan. They were too numerous.”
Balaji: Nationalists and socialists oppose crypto; libertarians on both sides support it
“The nationalists and socialists are against cryptocurrency, but the libertarian left and libertarian right are for it.”
Srinivasan: Web2 has become unexciting like legacy enterprise desktop programming
“All the web two stuff is basically like enterprise software. Okay. And it's like doing desktop programming. Look, it's fine. It's good. It's fundable. Knock yourself out. I'll probably use it. And I'm glad you're doing it, but it's also like, Eh, it's not that…”
COVID-19 could accelerate biomedical innovation as the internet accelerated software
“The silver lining of this is, this could be as much of an accelerant for biomedicine as the internet was for software.”
Srinivasan: Technologists Must Enter Citizen Journalism and Politics as Civic Duty
“Folks who have any form of technical or scientific background, I think need to, as like a civic duty, and this is, you know, both for this crisis and then for future kinds of things, we have to do journalism, citizen journalism, like a year of it, for example,…”
Srinivasan: Naming COVID-19 abstractly rather than 'Wuhan flu' avoids harmful regional stigma
“Didn't want to stigmatize a region by calling it like the Wuhan flu or the China flu. Like Reddit has a community called the China flu. That's not helpful for lots of reasons you know, like That area is hard enough hit. You don't want to hit it like, you know,…”