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
Scott Page: Making sense of complex systems requires ensembles of diverse models
“One way you can make sense of complexity is by throwing ensembles of models at both. So one of them may explain 20%, another 15%, and it's not that they add up to a hundred percent that they're explaining everything. In fact, if there's overlap, there's even s…”
Page: Data-driven success formulas fail when adopted at scale
“And in this book, The Formula, he talks about how these are the lessons for success by looking at tons and tons of data. And it's in some of it is about some of the things we were talking about before with Gawande's. You want to like make sure you use your net…”
Page: Successful people wrongly assume they won purely due to individual ability
“People who are successful by definition have, are in, have always won and they're in power and they think I'm good because I'm here because I'm good. And they typically are. And they tend to think they're there because they've had a lot of ability. They have a…”
Page: Decentralized market mechanisms fail on extremely complex problems
“But when it gets super hard, the market's not going to work.”
Scott Page: Big winners in positive-feedback markets depend as much on luck as skill
“If you thought, no, this person sold these books because they're just so much better, right? That's a very different story than if you say, no, just the natural process of people buying books leads to big winners. Then you start realizing, you know, the big wi…”
Page: Organizational efficiency pressures erode cognitive diversity in mental models
“When I go work for a firm, or if I'm working in an organization, you know, stock analyst, psychologist, whatever I'm doing, mental models that we use are like local interaction models. Right? I mean, like, it's like, oh, you're using that metal model. It's eas…”
Page: Decision-makers should only include mental models that tangibly improve performance
“No, you don't want to, so there's limits of inclusion, right? I mean, in the sense that, like, you only want to be inclusive to things that are actually going to help you to do whatever it is you're trying to do.”
Page: No single person can understand complex companies like Amazon
“There's so many dimensions to a company like Amazon or Disney, right, that there's no way any one person can understand it, and so what you want is you want cognitive diversity, and what that cognitive diversity means is people who have different, you know, li…”
Page: Rely on models when crowds agree, but investigate when predictions diverge
“What you should do instead is if the linear model and the people are close, you know, the prediction's You probably should go to the linear model because it's really well calibrated, right? It's probably gonna, you know, be better. But if they're far apart, if…”
Page: Repetition and high stakes push behavior toward rationality
“If it's repeated a lot, that should move you a little bit more towards the rational behavior, because people should learn. And if the stakes are huge, that should move you towards rational behavior.”
Page: Regressions only diagnose failures while models enable institutional design
“That's a question you can't touch, really, with, by running regressions necessarily, other than to identify the places where it's not working, right? But you can use models to help you kind of think through, what if we made this a market, right? What if we mad…”
Page: In multidimensional competition, there is no universally best profile
“One of the nice things that both those models sort of tell us is that there's kind of no best answer, because like you're going to win relative to how someone else is, so it's a strategy, it's more like a game, it's strategic, and there's no best thing you can…”