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 18 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
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: Ages 8 to 12 are a critical window for unsupervised peer adventure
“And so from age eight to 12, I think, is a sensitive period where kids are supposed to have adventures with other kids they play all kinds of games, they self-organize, and what we've done is we've taken that critical period, and we've said, stop, you don't ge…”
Haidt: Cap screen time at two hours, ban social media before high school
“So any parents who are listening to this podcast, I urge you to follow a few simple rules. That is two hours a day of screen time. And actually, the Apple controls are very good for that. The new ones just out a few months ago are actually very good for that. …”
Haidt: University administrators reflexively surrender to student demands for emotional safety
“It leads to an attitude in which everyone is afraid to judge on a case-by-case basis, and the response is pretty much always to give the students what they want. So individual professors do that. Administrators do that. And so if students are saying that somet…”
Haidt: The definition of trauma has expanded to mean mere unpleasantness
“Ideas of trauma are important in psychology and psychiatry, but now trauma has expanded to mean just unpleasant experience.”
Haidt: Humans evolved for group combat and confirmation bias, not truth-seeking
“If you're a homo sapien, you evolved for group combat, you evolved for confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. We're not really evolved to be academics or scientists searching for a truth in an unbiased way. We evolved to basically, you know, CYA and win in…”
Haidt: Human morality relies on five innate evolutionary foundations
“The five best candidates for being the taste buds of the moral sense, or the moral foundations were, Care, you know, care and compassion because we're mammals. We nurture our young. Fairness, reciprocity versus cheating. We're all sensitive to that. Loyalty, y…”
Haidt: Overprotection Since the 1990s Deprived Kids of Experiential Learning
“Kids learn best from feedback, from experience. And beginning, especially in the 19 nineties in the United States, and I think perhaps in Canada too we began really overprotecting kids. That is not giving them unsupervised time where they could learn from thei…”
Haidt: Call-out culture rewards policing single words over critiquing arguments
“But what a call out culture does, and this was Manning and Campbell's point,
Is that it incentivizes people.
It gives them status for finding errors in the speech of others.
And it's remarkable how often that error is a single word.
It's not usually the argume…”
Haidt: CBT improves thinking even for people without depression
“Just teach everyone CBT because it helps you think better, even if you're not depressed.”
Haidt: Surrounding ourselves with people who confirm our thoughts makes us stupid
“And if we surround ourselves with people who confirm our existing thoughts, we get stupid, quite frankly, stupid. And in this age of social media bubbles, that's a real problem.”
Haidt: Fear of reputational damage is a primary driver of moral behavior
“And I was referring back to the story of the Ring of Gyges from Plato's Republic, in which Plato asks, if a man had the mythical Ring of Gyges, in which if you turn the stone, the, you know, the gem inwards on your hand, it makes you invisible. He asks what ma…”
Haidt: Learning from experience is 10 to 100 times more effective than instruction
“And learning from feedback from experience is 10 or a hundred times more effective than telling kids a fact.”
Haidt: Bureaucracy and metrics strangle judgment and rob society of wisdom
“Teachers, doctors used to have much more leeway to exercise common sense, and then they could learn from feedback and they could develop skills of judgment. But the kind of the bureaucratizing mindset, the increasing use of metrics has led us to in a sense, st…”
Haidt: Morality universally emerges whenever humans interact and judge behaviors against norms
“When you have humans interacting, they almost immediately develop norms about behavior, and then they judge each other based on those norms. So that's morality.”