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
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…”
Collison: Making twice as many decisions at half precision is often better
“If you can make, like, if you can make twice as many decisions at half the, kind of half the precision, that's actually often better. And then given the fact that sort of the rate of improvement of decision making with additional time almost necessarily tends …”
Collison: Discrete organizational decision-making is overrated compared to continuous systems
“I'm inclined to say, I don't know if I actually believe this, but I'm inclined to say in response to that question that decision making in organizations is slightly overrated in that organizations are not like investment entities or funds or managers in that o…”
Collison: Making twice as many decisions at half precision is often better
“If you can make, like, if you can make twice as many decisions at half the, kind of half the precision, that's actually often better. And then given the fact that sort of the rate of improvement of decision making with additional time almost necessarily tends …”
Collison: A CEO being forced to decide indicates broken organizational architecture
“There are some decisions where if I'm making it or if I have to make it, that probably suggests that something else organizationally or institutionally has broken. And I think the need for a decision from anyone, not just from me is often like only a sort of a…”
Collison: Persistent organizational friction comes from latent disagreement over goals
“I think the more troubling ones and the ones that tend to cause more kind of persistent friction in an organization are where sort of there is latent disagreement in what you're actually optimizing for but that's kind of never explicitly surfaced and uncovered…”
Collison: Many organizations prioritize cohesion over intellectual correctness
“I think so many organizations prize sort of Smoothness and smoothness of sort of interactions and trying to reduce, minimize the number of sort of ruffled feathers. And they kind of at least sort of inadvertently, if not deliberately prefer cohesion over corre…”
Collison: Startup uncertainty is frustrating because time prevents gathering available info
“I think it's a more frustrating kind of uncertainty where it's actually not necessary, but the thing that's sort of limited is your, is essentially the cost of obtaining further information, reducing that uncertainty. And so you're left in this sort of dissati…”
Collison: Latent disagreement on optimization targets causes persistent organizational friction
“I think disagreement over sort of instrumental efficacy, you know, well, that's rarely that problematic a disagreement because, well, if you're right, then we'll soon learn that. If you're wrong, reality will probably sort of make that pretty clear in short or…”
Collison: Berkshire Hathaway and Koch Industries prioritize applied epistemology and structured doubt
“It's very striking to me how Warren and Charlie at Berkshire and how the folks at Koch Industries are so into a kind of epistemology and structuring of doubt and accounting for biases and mechanisms for clarity of thinking like to a very striking degree.”
Collison: Escalated CEO decisions usually signal an underlying organizational breakdown
“There are some decisions where if I'm making it or if I have to make it, that probably suggests that something else organizationally or institutionally has broken. And I think the need for a decision from anyone, not just from me, is often like only a sort of …”
Collison: A startup's default outcome is non-existence and survival is unnatural
“Especially for a startup, like the default outcome is your relatively near term non-existence. Like the default outcome is that you do not survive to survive over the medium or, you know, even with even more difficulty over the long term. That is, that's like …”
Collison: Scaling a business is straightforward yet extremely hard
“Scaling a business is both relatively straightforward and extremely hard. I mean, it's relatively straightforward in the sense that it's usually not that difficult to see what the problems are.”
Collison: Differing organizational time horizons cause a fundamental collaboration mismatch
“If an organization with a really long time horizon is working with one that's sort of rapidly updating and sort of rethinking there's just like a fundamental kind of impedance mismatch.”
Collison: Sociological Mindsets Impede Big Bets More Than Downside Costs
“It feels to me that actually the reasons that organizations don't take, don't tend to make more of these or make more good ones is It's more kind of sociological, more institutional, and less that it's fundamentally too costly, because in most cases, the downs…”
Collison: Rigorous thinking requires enjoying finding where one's beliefs fail
“I think that sort of getting that kind of rigor and clarity of thought requires sort of a joy of discovery at like, ah, this thing I believe, this rule that I thought existed, like it's actually not good in this place. And having that be an enjoyable discovery…”
Collison: Organizations should optimize feedback loops over binary decisions
“I think the things to optimize are the incentive structures and the,
Mindsets, and the definitions of the goals, and the feedback mechanisms from the outcomes to the inputs, and the work, and the operations themselves, and all of those things, and less the bin…”
Collison: Life is too short to read un-enjoyable books
“There's a set of great books that are really worth reading, right? And there's a subset of those books that that are really enjoyable to read. Maybe it's like 10 or 20% of them, say. And the subset, the intersection of really worth reading and really enjoyable…”
Collison: Always discard your current book for a better one
“At every moment you should be reading the best book you know of in the world. I mean, I don't mean kind of the absolute best for everyone, but sort of The best book for you. But like as soon as you discover something that that seems more interesting or more im…”
Collison: Most Causally Influential Books Are Often Not the Best Ones
“What I've often found is I think the books that perhaps did in fact influence me the most in a causal sense are often not necessarily that good, right? And that maybe I'll read a book that sort of triggers a realization or some idea or something, and that, tha…”
Collison: Cold outreach to admired thinkers is highly asymmetric
“And, you know, when you reach out to these people, yeah, half the time they don't respond but, you know, half the time they do, and, you know, it's asymmetric. It doesn't really cost you much when they don't, and it can be incredibly rewarding when they do.”