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 14 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
Stanley: Dismissing experts' subjective sense of 'interesting' cripples innovation
“It's actually the subjective judgments are the interesting ones because, like, the objective judgments are easy. You don't need a degree to just measure something. You know, some kid takes some test, you get a score. You can average them across everybody at th…”
Stanley: Direct pursuit of human-level AI is a naive objective
“Like, at some level, there's, like, this really grandiose conception of, like, some human-like computer, and, like, that is, I think, a naive objective right now. Like, you just don't want to know how to do that. We don't know what the stepping stones are that…”
Stanley: AI research proves objective-driven achievement is deeply flawed
“And in the course of doing that research, we just started to see undeniable evidence that that approach to achievement has some serious flaws.”
Stanley: Major breakthroughs require positioning for serendipity rather than setting objectives
“And actually like a lot of what we do that facilitates making these kinds of important discoveries is to actually set us up, set ourselves up for having effective serendipity, which is not the way that we, you know, talk about things when you talk about settin…”
Stanley: Complex problems like education cannot be solved by direct metric optimization
“We cannot make progress in certain kinds of extremely complex problems, which education is one of those. Simply by just laying out some assessment system and then trying to follow it towards this global objective, which is just incredibly complex to get to.”
Stanley: Metrics are useless for hard problems because required stepping stones are counterintuitive
“If the actual stepping stones that lead to where we want to go are counterintuitive, in other words, they're not what you would expect, then the metrics are useless, right? Because they won't detect those stepping stones because they don't look like what the m…”
Stanley: Evolution solved all problems in one run, unlike typical ML
“Evolution, it's a very unique thing in the sense that it's kind of like a search or like a learning algorithm that discovered everything that was ever created in nature in a single run. This is very different from like what you see in typical machine learning,…”
Stanley: Short-term metric gains in complex problems are deceptive dead ends
“Even if your score on a metric is going up in the short run, it doesn't mean it will all get all the way to the point that you want it to get. That's a fundamental problem. It's called deception. And it's a fundamental problem of all complex problems.”
Stanley: Innovation spreads via individual contrarians, not broad consensus
“How innovation actually happens is individual connections. Most people see some idea somebody had and say, well, that doesn't fit with the usual paradigm. Like that's not actually a good idea. Like we know the right way. Now we're all very sure right now what …”
Stanley: Scientific peer review and grant evaluation are flawed by objective thinking
“I think peer review in scientific publication and also in like the assessment of proposals for getting grants, Is, is flawed also because of objective thinking, but it is a place where I think we can if we structure it right, which would be somewhat different …”
Stanley: True visionaries spot when stepping stones snap into place
“I think a visionary is somebody, in contrast, who has recognized when the stepping stones actually have snapped into place. Now, that's a person you should follow, and that's a very interesting and unique kind of person. It's a different kind of a person, and …”
Stanley: Complex discovery requires a portfolio of stepping stones, like investing
“Because we don't know the stepping stones, what we need to do is we need to proliferate stepping stones, like stepping stone candidates, things that could lead to something interesting. But we don't know which one. It's a lot, this is related in some ways to i…”
Stanley: Middle managers cannot permit creative exploration because they answer to their own superiors
“The real problem for your boss is they have a boss. How are they going to explain it to their boss? The problem is that this culture percolates through everything. So like everybody's trapped in, even if they believe in what I'm saying”
Stanley: Older luminaries get stuck because deviating from success is scary
“I think this is why like luminaries kind of get stuck in a rut as they get older.
It's part of it.
I think is that it's really,
It's really scary, like, to leave that path, because that's what you're known for, that's what everybody respects you for, and you'r…”