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'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires

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Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires

#141

Post by wolverine876 »

lmm wrote: post #114
wolverine876 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conflict will happen if it's a truly honest system. If there's no conflict, people are not telling the truth about things that cause conflict. Does it happen, and how does the system handle it?

When someone has made an honest mistake, exposing that is not a source of conflict. The conflict only arises when the "mistake" wasn't honest, but rather the person was being dishonest about their goals from the start.

Again, that's an ideal, and I promote that ideal and do my best to practice it. But if there is no conflict, there is certainly dishonesty. A social system that pretends there is none is a lie, and everyone knows it (but apparently can't say so). A social system that pretends there is no conflict is like a software development system that pretends there are no bugs.

Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires

#142

Post by saghm »

strangattractor wrote: post #95

I love the pee story here. A long time ago I was friends with a facilities person at Apple. She told of a peculiar case where she was called in to take care of a problem in one of the conference rooms. Apparently someone had not thought a meeting had gone well. That evening they had returned to the conference room and taken a dump on the table. Message received. Maybe someone was trying to send a Ray a message with a…

That's pretty awful; making some random innocent cleaning person deal with literal shit does nothing to the person you're actually mad at.

Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires

#143

Post by aleph_minus_one »

pstuart wrote: post #81
throw3823423 wrote: post #63

I worked with Ferrucci in BW. The internals of the employee rating system that preceded him were hilarious. In short: Everyone is encouraged to rate anyone else in a variety of categories, as often as possible. Every rating is public. You know who is rating you, and how they did it. Those ratings are put together to get a score in every category, and can be seen by anyone. It's your Baseball Card. The problem is that…

Incentives are a hell of a drug. It would be so cool if someone could apply game theory for mortals that could digest these systems and show how to make them more "fair". It may be an impossible task but it seems worthy of exploration.

> It would be so cool if someone could apply game theory for mortals that could digest these systems and show how to make them more "fair". It may be an impossible task but it seems worthy of exploration.

I consider this to be a hard, but clearly not an impossible task. What I rather consider to be nigh impossible is to get a good definition on what we actually want to achieve by creating these systems. There is where in my opinion the true difficulties lie.

Just to give some shallow examples:

Do we want to make this purpose be quite fixed (say, for decades) (and create a system around this purpose)? Then it will be quite hard to change the ship's directions if because of some event the economic environment changes a lot.

On the other hand: do you want to make the system's purpose very flexible, so that the system can react to such circumstances? You can bet that this will be gamed towards the political whims of the people inside the system.

On the other hand: if you want to get a glimpse at system ideas that did "work out", look at long-existing religions, or entrepreneurial dynasties with a history of centuries. It should be obvious that these examples are far off from a "democratic", "particapative" spirit (which perhaps should be a lesson for anybody designing such systems).

Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires

#144

Post by lmm »

wolverine876 wrote: post #141
lmm wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When someone has made an honest mistake, exposing that is not a source of conflict. The conflict only arises when the "mistake" wasn't honest, but rather the person was being dishonest about their goals from the start.

Again, that's an ideal, and I promote that ideal and do my best to practice it. But if there is no conflict, there is certainly dishonesty. A social system that pretends there is none is a lie, and everyone knows it (but apparently can't say so). A social system that pretends there is no conflict is like a software development system that pretends there are no bugs.

> if there is no conflict, there is certainly dishonesty

Do you consider honest disagreement (whether about facts or about priorities) to be "conflict"? That is something that always happens, but secret nonalignment doesn't always have to happen.

Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires

#145

Post by wolverine876 »

lmm wrote: post #144
wolverine876 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, that's an ideal, and I promote that ideal and do my best to practice it. But if there is no conflict, there is certainly dishonesty. A social system that pretends there is none is a lie, and everyone knows it (but apparently can't say so). A social system that pretends there is no conflict is like a software development system that pretends there are no bugs.

> if there is no conflict, there is certainly dishonesty Do you consider honest disagreement (whether about facts or about priorities) to be "conflict"? That is something that always happens, but secret nonalignment doesn't always have to happen.

I mean anger, people feeling threatened/unsafe, etc. It doesn't always happen, it can be reduced, but you're kidding yourself if it isn't happening. Again, like getting zero bug reports for your software - something is wrong.

Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires

#146

Post by catlover76 »

pavlov wrote: post #33

Also in the Vanity Fair there’s an extract from the new book about the time the future FBI director was snooping for employees’ dirty laundry at Dalio’s hedge fund and conducting year-long show trials: “Inside James Comey’s Bizarre $7M Job as a Top Hedge Fund’s In-House Inquisitor” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/11/james-comey-dalio-br... It’s every bit as strange as it sounds.

Lawyers really like external validation from authority figures, and Dalio sounds like a douche whose ego needs for others to feel they want his external validation.

The section with the multiple investigations of the employee who didn't bring in the bagels really brings that home lol

Match made in heaven.

Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires

#148

Post by cjohnson318 »

kyleyeats wrote: post #44
cjohnson318 wrote: post #15

I stopped listening to Ray Dalio when he trotted out the meme about out of control crime in big cities at the beginning of one interview or another. I don't know if he's lazy, or out of touch, but I don't like it when people are fast and loose with extremely verifiable information. Like, maybe you have expert intuition the future of inflation, that's great; but if you're going to talk about extremely verifiable infor…

Would you say that believability is very important to you?

I think that supporting an argument with accepted facts is a good way to build trust.

Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires

#149

Post by karmakurtisaani »

pavlov wrote: post #33

Also in the Vanity Fair there’s an extract from the new book about the time the future FBI director was snooping for employees’ dirty laundry at Dalio’s hedge fund and conducting year-long show trials: “Inside James Comey’s Bizarre $7M Job as a Top Hedge Fund’s In-House Inquisitor” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/11/james-comey-dalio-br... It’s every bit as strange as it sounds.

Absolutely wild.

Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires

#150

Post by lmm »

wolverine876 wrote: post #145
lmm wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if there is no conflict, there is certainly dishonesty Do you consider honest disagreement (whether about facts or about priorities) to be "conflict"? That is something that always happens, but secret nonalignment doesn't always have to happen.

I mean anger, people feeling threatened/unsafe, etc. It doesn't always happen, it can be reduced, but you're kidding yourself if it isn't happening. Again, like getting zero bug reports for your software - something is wrong.

Will it happen? Sure. Can you reduce it to the level where it doesn't significantly deter people from being honest about issues? IME yes, though perhaps not in every kind of organisation.
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