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 2,831 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 26 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
Freston: Political Attacks on DEI Are Racism Without the Dog Whistle
“It's racism without the dog whistle.”
Russell: Tesla's vision system fails to stop for child crash dummies
“Like, literally, if you put, like, a, you know, a crash dummy right in front of the car like a child pedestrian crash dummy, like, it doesn't come to a safe stop, like, at a reasonable speed.”
Elon Musk falsely brands assisted driving systems as fully autonomous
“I think a lot of the friction of why it's been so controversial in terms of what he's saying is because he's calling an assisted driving system and autonomous driving system.”
Nocera: Comparing lockdown and non-lockdown country data shows no difference
“They don't work. If you look at countries that locked down versus countries that didn't lock down, you don't, you can't tell which is which. You absolutely can't.”
Nocera: Great Barrington Declaration approach was the right pandemic response
“The heroes of our book, they're the guys who wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, and their view was, you protect the elderly and the immunocompromised, and you let everybody else live their life. When you get down to little kids, I mean, very, very few lit…”
Hoffman: Elon Musk's AI Pause Petition Was Intellectually Dishonest
“Well, Elon's in particular was signing this six month pause letter while trying to hire people and buy as much compute and get going as fast as possible. Everyone else slow down so I can catch up. That's not intellectually honest.”
Freston: CEOs like Tim Cook appease Trump out of fear and cronyism
“When you have Tim Cook coming into the Oval Office with a gold gift for Trump, this reminds me, I spent a lot of time in third world countries, cronyism and favoritism. I mean, it's just, I mean, it's appalling. But people think this is what you have to do to …”
Pincus: Founders should not accept coaching from non-operator VCs
“I actually have a lot of coaches, but I've chosen all them, and I'm not coachable by a VC who's never held this job, who never sat in this seat, and so I guess it's not exactly advice, but it was implied advice of, you know, I should pretend that I'm going to …”
Wilson: Caregiver earnings rates disputed by FTC were based on real data
“There was another piece where they challenged that the rate that caregivers were making were, maybe not fully an accurate depiction of that rate. We don't know how they could have claimed that because that was, actual real data that we would get off our transa…”
Krishna: Foundation AI models will become commodities within one to three years
“I think foundation models are going to become commodities. By the way, not that far out. Is it a year? Is it two years? Is it three years? Commodities doesn't mean that they don't have value. Gold is a commodity. So is iron. So commodities means that there is …”
Krishna: AI token pricing will rise significantly to justify capital investments
“Second, I think that right now the token price on all of these is going to go way up. It just has to justify the capital investments.”
Berman: Silicon Valley Investors Actively Seek Revenge as a Founder Motivator
“One of the handful of things that investors are looking for as a motivator is revenge. It's a big one. People have got really something to prove and want to just go assassinate the competition.”
Webb: China will technologically leapfrog the US within ten years
“So what's gonna wind up happening is, 10 years from now, China's gonna leapfrog us. I'm sorry, but like, anybody can, like, I'm happy to argue with anybody all day long about this, but we are missing the structural components for success.”
Masad: Most people wanting to build software should not learn to code
“Like, you know, I don't think you, most people who want to make things with software and computers don't need to learn how to code. It's going to be a huge cost on them. It's going to take a lot of time, but instead just jump into making things.”
Brink: Hybrid work cannot build company culture, collaboration, or learning
“There are some benefits to having flexibility and hybrid, but creating culture and creating collaboration and learning, that's not one of the benefits. You know, you really have to get people together to be able to do that”
Holiday: Elon Musk is a genius who broke his own brain
“Well, Elon is one of the smartest people on the planet, right? It's like, to say that Elon Musk is not smart, which some people have started to say, it's like saying he's not rich. Like, it's just, it's a fact, you know? He is a genius in many, many ways. He i…”
Welch argues employees generally must work in the office for promotions
“Yes, I think so. I mean, I see it all the time. I think in general, you're, you've got to be in the office if you want to be promoted.”
Eidelman: Private equity veterinary roll-ups optimize economics but ignore clinic operations
“The private equity roll ups and that model that were, you know, happening in parallel elsewhere where you would have, you know, sort of shadow private equity firms buying up mom and pop clinics. The motto of one of the largest ones was join us, stay you, which…”
Hoffman: Most government tech procurement RFPs produce broken, quickly outdated software
“It's one of the reasons why, you know, most governments around the world have really broken RFP solutions for technology because they go, oh, I will specify the 150 requirements. And then when whoever provider Usually pretty incompetent people, you know, kind …”
Gov. Wes Moore: Billionaires are not a policy failure, poverty is
“When people say that being a billionaire is a poverty is a policy failure. No. How many people living in poverty is a policy failure?”
Galloway: 99% of CEOs should avoid political stances at all costs
“But for 99% of CEOs, my suggestion would be just avoid it at all costs and say, We're going to try and create economic security for you and your family, such that on weekends, whatever you want to do politically, recreational, if you want to be a DJ or you wan…”
Galloway: Breaking up Big Tech, Pharma, and agriculture is the best anti-inflation fix
“I think the best thing we could do for inflation would be a series of breaking up everything from big chicken and big pharma to big tech.”
Galloway: Remove Section 230 immunity for algorithmically elevated content
“I would remove section two 30 for all algorithmically elevated content.”
Hoffman: An AI GP as good as an average doctor is months away
“We could construct in a small number of months a medical assistant that is as capable as kind of call it You know an average GP or better that could run for, you know, small number of dollars per hour.”
Bret Taylor argues AI hallucinations will help solve digital disinformation
“And if you want a contrarian take on this, I think it will help with the disinformation problem a bit. People don't assume everything coming out of these agents is a hundred percent accurate and they like verify it. And my hope is the combination of these AI t…”
Wang: Humans will always hold a reasoning advantage in long-duration thought
“The areas where humans will always have a meaningful sort of reasoning or intelligence advantage relative to models is long form thought long duration thought, thinking over long time horizons.”
Nachman: Social media platform liability for synthetic content will spur safety innovation
“There should be content regulation, right? There should be liability when you actually are not, when you're serving that content and the impact of serving that content. And I think that will probably unlock a really interesting innovation there because that th…”
Maples: Real Monopolies Require Government Coercion to Survive
“It is extraordinarily difficult to maintain a monopoly. That's not coercive. So like, you know, the only real monopolies that exists can be granted by the government and can be coercively maintained.”
Russell: Luminar can be a trillion-dollar company integrated into every car
“It's this kind of thing where, you know, you have this outcome of where it's, like, very, very clear in your head, like, how we're gonna execute on these programs, how, you know, we'll see Luminar in every car, how, you know, it can be a trillion dollar compan…”
Russell: LiDAR is fundamentally required to prevent accidents and enable autonomy
“If you want to be able to prevent accidents and do autonomous, right, this is not an optional system. This is something that's fundamentally required to be able to prevent accidents.”
Raskin: ESP will have capability to contact non-human cultures within six years
“In the next six years we will make contact or have the technical capability of making contact with these thirty four million year old cultures.”
Roy-Chowdhury predicts AI will ultimately be a net job creator
“First of all, I do think that AI will be a net job creator.”
Andrew Chen: Startups failing to reach a $1B valuation have failed
“I have a, an advisor, Andrew Chen. He's like, if you're not a billion dollar company, you failed.”
Hoffman: Open-sourcing AI tools hands election interference tech to North Korea
“You know, when you open source tools, well, all those tools, once you open source, you know, you might as well just, you know, ship it right over to North Korea to say, interfere away.”
Clark: Biden administration regulatory overreach feels unprecedented to business leaders
“I think what's happening in the Biden administration is regulatory overreach that feels unprecedented to us.”
Clark: Companies must tell employees not to bring politics to work
“And my personal view is that we have to tell people you can't, right? We're a fifty-fifty country. You think you know what the person in the next cubicle thinks or the next Zoom box, but you might be wrong, right? And so how do we evolve to a place where we ca…”
Clark: Big Tech is the one advantage U.S. adversaries cannot match
“One of the things that concerns me is if you look at our big tech companies, it's the one thing our adversaries cannot beat us at. They have not been able to figure it out, right?”
Kawasaki: If Apple and Tim Cook cannot take moral stands, nobody can
“Your moral compass should exist at a higher level than, how can I make the most money? And so you may have to, you know, you may have to take stands. And to take an extreme example if Apple and Tim Cook cannot take a stand, who can? Who can? You're the most fr…”
Shein copied Cassey Ho's skort twice despite a conversation with its president
“And so what's been so crazy is that they not only copied that skirt once, they did it twice after we had a conversation about it. I talked to the president of US Sheehan, like it was a whole thing.”
Farquhar: Daily office attendance does not correlate with employee connection
“And what we did is we correlated those answers with how frequently people come to an office and how frequently they do what we call intentional togetherness gathering. And we found that people just turning up to the office every day was not correlated.”
Camera-only driver assistance systems fail basic crash dummy stopping tests
“Reality is it is great to see some improvements for some basic level of assisted driving capabilities, but it doesn't solve some of the fundamentals of what you need to do to prevent accidents. Like literally, if you put a crash dummy right in front of the car…”
Princess Reema: Challenges for Saudi women mirror those in the West
“The challenge for women in my country today is no different than the challenge for women in your country.”
Gelsinger: Intel was mismanaged for over a decade
“And I came back to Intel that was, you know, mismanaged for over a decade.”
Gelsinger says Intel will extend Moore's law until exhausting the periodic table
“We're not gonna let Moore's Law die until the periodic table is exhausted, and we have a lot of elements yet to go.”
Fake: Social platforms are defined entirely by the behavior they tolerate
“One of the things that Heather Champ, who is a community manager, the first community manager on Flickr, one thing that she says repeatedly is that what you tolerate is what you are. So if you tolerate white supremacists on your platform, you are a platform fo…”
Vaynerchuk: In-office employees advance faster than remote workers due to osmosis
“It is very clear to me that the employees globally that are in the office are advancing past the ones that are not, because they're winning on the biggest thing in an office, it's called osmosis.”
McLean: Leaders hid behind epidemiologists and market forces
“Leaders need to be leaders, and that means not hiding behind other people, and our leaders hid behind epidemiologists in the crisis, and they've hidden behind the gods of the market for the last number of decades, and refuse to do things like, say, maybe it do…”
Hoffman: GPT-4 is already superintelligent due to breadth across domains
“We already have super intelligence. GBD-IV is super intelligent. That doesn't mean, for example, if you say, okay, GBD-IV, tell Reid Hoffman how to better invest in artificial intelligence or craft good artificial intelligence that'll say anything that the exp…”