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 283 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
Freston: Political Attacks on DEI Are Racism Without the Dog Whistle
“It's racism without the dog whistle.”
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: 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 …”
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.”
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: 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.”
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…”
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.”
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: 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?”
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.”
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…”
Hoffman: Framing AI primarily as an existential threat is naive
“And one of the things I think is naive about that statement and the reason I didn't sign it is because while it can be an existential risk, just like, you know, for example, you create nuclear power and nuclear weapons or an existential risk, it is also one of…”
Lubetzky: Selective corporate silence on antisemitism is morally repugnant
“Any corporation that chose not to speak up after nine 11, not to speak up after Russia's attacks against Ukraine, not to speak up after the horrible murder of George Floyd, can be excused for saying we don't ever comment. But if you've spoken in the past about…”
Lubetzky: Extremist Israeli leaders must be isolated and removed from power
“And there are some amongst our Israeli friends, and they need to be isolated and removed from power.”
Lubetzky: Peace with Israel requires first dislodging Hamas from Gaza
“I agree, but I do not know a way that we ultimately help build a Palestinian state in peace with Israel without first dislodging Hamas from control of Gaza.”
Hoffman: The Six-Month AI Pause Letter Is 'Laughable' and Wrong
“Most of the folks who go concerns, go everything from the relatively laughable and silly six-month pause letter, which is kind of like wrong in its theory of human nature, wrong in its theory of technological development, wrong in its theory, like, just kind o…”
Suleyman: Society Should Prioritize Near-Term AI Threats Over Sci-Fi Existential Risk
“There's many more Practical near-term threats to stability, which we should be focused on rather than talking about existential risk and AGI suddenly emerging and exploding and taking over and manipulating us and taking over armies and all of this kind of fear…”
Hoffman: Obsessing Over Robot Overlords Increases the Likelihood of Dystopia
“One of the places where the most of the existential risk people are doing a disservice and causing an increased likelihood of dystopia is that by focusing on kind of future robot overlords versus how human beings use this technology, Including, by the way, cri…”
Hoffman: Governments Attempting to Slow Big Tech AI Are Misguided
“If you listen to the press and listen to the committees of people that are like, oh, we should slow these big tech companies down. It's like, well, actually, in fact, That's a bad participation because we have line of sight to a medical assistant, a tutor, you…”
Fisher: Laws should mandate companies share 10% of profits with employees
“I actually think we should have a law that forces every company to share 10% of their profits with their employees.”
Hoffman: Proposing a six-month AI pause is like refusing word processors
“I'm hearing a whole bunch of, we should have a six month pause. And I kind of don't understand that you have to learn these tools. It's kind of like saying, I'm going to be a writer and I'm not going to use a word processor. I'm going to be a graphic designer …”
Hoffman: No member of Congress should be trusted with tech development
“I don't think there's a single member of Congress that I would trust with technological development and knowing how to navigate that.”
Hoffman: Founders currently must move to Silicon Valley to scale tech startups
“But unless you have a truly compelling reason, such as staying close to your customers, I believe that you currently have to come to Silicon Valley to scale a tech company.”
Obama: Single-payer healthcare would have been economically disruptive and politically impossible
“Not only politically would it be impossible to start from scratch, but economically be wildly disruptive. A lot of people work for insurance companies and a lot of people work for hospitals under current arrangements and doctors get paid in certain ways and so…”
Anagnost contrasts Autodesk's utility with tech firms harming teenagers or publishers
“I go home every night thinking I do something that's useful to the world. I don't go home thinking I screwed up teenagers' minds. I don't go home thinking I screwed up the whole publishing industry. I don't go home with any of those feelings. I go home feeling…”
Krishna: AI data center buildout promises make no economic sense
“If I take all the verbal promises, and if you say there's a 125 gigawatts of AI data centers that are going to come online in the next two to three years, that's the eight to 12 trillion of CapEx in total. Not in one year, in total. That is where I come to. I …”
Robins: Prediction markets offer DraftKings revenue in non-betting states
“And so I view it as a space that we can incrementally add more revenue and win in and add more customers, especially in the States that don't have our traditional sports betting product. I think it's a fantastic product for places like where we are now, Califo…”
Masad: Karl Marx was right in his critique of capitalism
“I think Marx was right on a lot of the critique of capitalism, maybe not the solutions.”
Masad: Eliezer Yudkowsky's AI extinction arguments rely on flawed logic
“I don't think anything that Eliezer Rutkowski read, for example Eliezer Rutkowski, big AI, maybe he doesn't describe himself as a Doomer, I would say AI Doomer, wrote a lot about how AI could end the world and kill literally everyone. Like, I can't, like, you …”
Hoffman: AI is the only viable defense against future pandemics
“Like, for example, we obviously run more and more at risk of serious pandemics, whether they're manmade or natural or anything else. AI is the only thing I can really think of as a good defense against that.”
Rascoff: Reg A offerings are the future of pre-IPO capital raising
“We think it's the future of capital. It's sort of capital raising at this Kind of bridge moment once you're done raising venture capital from traditional Silicon Valley type investors, but before you're publicly traded up.”
Brown-Philpot: There is no pipeline problem finding under-invested venture entrepreneurs
“The second is, is there's no pipeline problem of finding under-invested entrepreneurs. There just isn't. If you talk about what you want to do and do the work, it will happen.”
Galloway: Mobile phone voting will not happen because higher turnout favors Democrats
“Voting on phones. But it's not gonna happen because it would be detrimental. It would benefit Democrats. Because when the number of people voting goes up, it's good for Democratic candidates, and the number of people going, voting goes down, it's good for Repu…”
Eric Schmidt: Companies are walking back 'bring your whole self to work'
“So now what has happened is there's been this view that you should bring your whole self to work, and now we're being forced to crawl that back because your whole self is maybe not what we want in work.”
Wang: AI labs underfund interpretability and deepfake detection for new capabilities
“The leading AI labs, you know, they're incentivized very much so to build Incredible new capabilities. But there's a lot of very important technical work and technical research that's been done in areas that are that are not building, you know, cooler capabili…”
Hoffman: Winning in AI requires more than training large models
“People say, well, it's all about the size of the model you're training. So it'll be open AI, Google, Microsoft, you know, and that's it. And you're like, well, no, actually, in fact, there's going to be a lot more than just the size of the model you're trainin…”