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 13 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
Sutherland: Pedestrians will exploit driverless cars because they always yield without retaliating
“Now, if we take this in in the driverless car situation, we'll know that when we want to cross the road, we just walk out in front of a driverless car, because it's always going to stop. Now, this may cause the passengers in the driverless car to lurch around …”
Sutherland: Trial Lawyers Heavily Fund US Democrats to Block Tort Reform
“Particularly because there's no tort law reform in the US, and that's partly because, I was told yesterday, trial lawyers are among largest donors to the Democratic Party because they resist any kind of tort law reform.”
Ogilvy Australia made only $350k on an idea that generated $1 billion
“There's an idea conceived by Ogilvy Australia. It has made that company in excess of a billion dollars in the last 10 years. It's still running. It runs in something like a hundred markets. Still useful today. For that idea, the agency in Australia got paid 35…”
Sutherland: Swedish Study Found Sunbed Users Had Higher Life Expectancy
“So there was a study, actually, among Swedes where there was a higher instance of skin cancer among Swedish sunbed addicts, but they actually had a higher life expectancy, which they didn't expect.”
People will learn to trap autonomous vehicles with simple visual tricks
“Someone is going to find a way of hacking that driverless car. Within seconds. By which I mean, you know, they'll work out that by putting a particular pattern of balloons on the road, the driverless car basically starts just going around in ridiculous circles…”
Royal Mail discovered customer satisfaction relied entirely on liking the postman
“The major determinant of whether you liked Royal Mail or not was whether you liked your postman, or postie, technically, to be used the gender-neutral term.
So people who had a rather unreliable service, but the postman did the odd favor for them, left things …”
The British sparkling wine industry was saved by raising prices 150%
“So, the guy who rescued the British sparkling wine industry effectively did so by improving quality by 10%, 20%, and then putting up price by about a 150%. Because price is a signal.”
Sutherland: Wine tastes better when poured from a heavier bottle
“Wine will taste better if you pour it from a heavier bottle.”
Sutherland: Advertising used randomized trials decades before medical science adopted them
“The randomized control trial was being widely used in advertising in the Edwardian era, and it took medical science and until about 1947, before they reached the same point of sophistication as the advertising industry.”
Sutherland: Vanishingly few Google users click 'I'm Feeling Lucky'
“The number of people who actually click it, i.e., I'm feeling lucky, take me straight to a single page, is vanishingly small. People want to choose between, you know, effectively above-the-fold options”
Four out of five IPA Gold advertising winners are family-controlled businesses
“Four out of the five gold winners, it's only every two years, this award, and it's very, very rigorously judged. Four out of the five winners, namely McCain, your Canadian heroes. McCain, Yorkshire Tea, Specsavers, and Lathwaites, a wine company. Four out of t…”
Sutherland: Hermès Kelly Bags Resell Above Retail Due to Purchase Restrictions
“Some of those things, by the way, weirdly, you can resell them for more than the purchase price, because in some cases, the Kelly bag, for example, they won't sell it to you until you've been a fairly reliable customer of theirs for some time, and therefore th…”