Fascinated by: Ray Dalio

Ray Dalio, billionaire founder of Bridgewater Associates, one of the world’s largest hedge funds.

That’s a 30 minute video he made about how the economy works, nbd.

A brilliant person with an atypical mind who lays out their worldview in a kind of manifesto can pretty much always get my attention.

Three of his Dalio’s beliefs:

• “algorithmic decision-making is coming at you fast”
• evolution is good
• to achieve success you must face and accept harsh realities

You can read his Principles online.  Soon they are coming out in book form, I’ve pre-ordered.   Here’s a sample, from the Principles website, which is www.principles.com:

A lot to think about in Ray Dalio’s Principles.

BUT: let’s limit our discussion today to one moment in his TED Talk above.  We’re going to talk about a joke and the audience reaction to it.

You’ll have to watch about one minute of the talk.  Start at 14:30.

Dalio is describing a complex system where everyone in his company rates each other and is radically transparent with each other.  Everyone can rate each other, in different areas.  Even a lowly employee can rate Ray, creating charts like this:

At 14:46 he says that because of this, at Bridgewater there is no politics.

Which: Ray Dalio is 100x smarter than me, but I’ll bet ten dollars there are indeed politics at Bridgewater Associates, probably insane, high-order, wildly weird politics.

Anyway.

At 15:13 Ray Dalio makes a joke.  This being his TED talk, no doubt a joke he had practiced.  Radical transparency, he says, doesn’t apply to everything.

You don’t have to tell somebody their bald spot is growing or their baby’s ugly.

People laugh a little bit.  Dalio continues.

I’m talking about the important things.

People laugh a LOT.

Dalio seems even thrown by how much the audience laughs at the second part, not the intended punchline.

Why?

The audience laughs because Dalio is missing the point.

Dalio inadvertently reveals he doesn’t know what the important things are to most people.

What are “the important things?” Making sound investment decisions? Tweaking the algorithm properly? Workplace communication?

Whatever, yes, in theory.

But really?  No. To most humans whether your bald spot is growing and whether your baby is ugly are the important things.  It would hurt way worse to be told either of those than that you’re ineffectively communicating in the meeting.  That pain is a measure of importance.

The audience is expressing laughter / disbelief at the fact Dalio assumes workplace discussion is more important than stuff like whether your baby is ugly.

Perhaps Ray Dalio doesn’t get it because he’s trained himself not to feel that kind of sensitivity.  That’s one of the points of Principles, to train your mind to get that nonsense out of the way.  It’s served him very well as an investor.

But it’s a little robotic, and a little detached, and a little inhuman.

If I worked for Dalio, I suspect I’d rate him low in the category of “empathy / compassion / understanding for what matters to people / sensitivity.”

But then, are those categories even in the algorithm?

Oh btw James Comey used to work for Ray Dalio, and also Dalio recently recommended allocating 5-10% of assets to gold.

speaking of

algorithm

source: Wiki user Fulvio Spada

looked it up at Online Etymology, my new fave site.

algorithm (n.)1690s, “Arabic system of computation,” from French algorithme, refashioned (under mistaken connection with Greek arithmos “number”) from Old French algorisme “the Arabic numeral system” (13c.), from Medieval Latin algorismus, a mangled transliteration of Arabic al-Khwarizmi “native of Khwarazm” (modern Khiva in Uzbekistan), surname of the mathematician whose works introduced sophisticated mathematics to the West (see algebra). The earlier form in Middle English was algorism (early 13c.), from Old French. Meaning broadened to any method of computation; from mid-20c. especially with reference to computing.

The man from Khwarizmi.

Wiki:

Few details of al-Khwārizmī’s life are known with certainty.

He worked in Baghdad as a scholar at the House of Wisdom established by Caliph al-Ma’mūn, where he studied the sciences and mathematics, which included the translation of Greek and Sanskrit scientific manuscripts.