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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

#51

Post by esafak »

23B1 wrote: post #37
esafak wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does the military rating system work?

I've seen multiple. The one I like is 'pinks and blues' where you're given two of each - a pink and a blue - and you write out why you think two dudes should get a blue (good) and a bad (pink). If you start accruing a bunch of pinks, there's a problem. It's very simple and probably wouldn't pass muster with an HR department, but it was effective at getting rid of turds.

Can you split the votes as you want among the candidates or does each have to get at least one review? How often do you rate? Do you only rate peers, or new hires? What about superiors?

I could not find any reference to this system. As a person below said it recalls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_voting

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

#52

Post by sbierwagen »

Very funny. If it's true that all the talk of computers and statistical modelling at Bridgewater is bullshit, and it's just a vanilla hedge fund, then it reminds me of the story from The Man Who Solved the Market that Renaissance was founded as a quant fund but none of the algorithms actually worked, so Simons just traded on hunches until D.E Shaw started competing with them years later.

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

#53

Post by passion__desire »

23B1 wrote: post #17

It's interesting. I have seen rating systems work – in the military. They're harsh to some, but in some situations, you have to filter out B and C players to keep the A players alive. I do think transparent systems w/360º peer reviews are better than many others. I wonder what else is out there that might work.

Prediction markets : Have a system where people can make predictions in semi serious fashion in any field, record them with reasoning and probability numbers and match them later on. Atleast this will prove how deeply they know about a field they are interested in. Tagline: Prediction is Intelligence

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

#54

Post by gottorf »

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…

> if you're going to talk about extremely verifiable information, like per-capita crime rates in American cities, then you should have your facts straight.

To be fair, if his claim is "out of control crime" and you interpret it as "out of control crime rates", you're talking about different things. There's enough anecdotal evidence to suggest that in some big cities, the occurrence of certain kinds of crime (like cars being broken into) is up, yet reporting is down, leading to a lower crime rate that doesn't reflect the street-level reality accurately.

Of course, this isn't a problem limited to this domain.

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

#55

Post by immibis »

RGamma wrote: post #4

This may have been just a stupid delusion by Dalio but some day one of these sociopaths is gonna get their hands on the wrong AI model and end us all. The necessary precondition of private individuals side stepping democratic control via their unchecked powerful organizations is already established. Gotta hope for the whistleblowers...

This is already happening, and has nothing to do with LLMs. Look at the other thread about banks closing customer accounts for no reason.

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

#57

Post by fzeroracer »

erulabs wrote: post #5
RGamma wrote: post #4

This may have been just a stupid delusion by Dalio but some day one of these sociopaths is gonna get their hands on the wrong AI model and end us all. The necessary precondition of private individuals side stepping democratic control via their unchecked powerful organizations is already established. Gotta hope for the whistleblowers...

I think you're seeing it wrong. When CEOs no longer need scientists and engineers, when they can speak their will into existence directly, they will immediately destroy themselves . This rating system, had the CEO gotten it's say, would not have made Bridgewater thrive. That stupid ideas are often impossible to accomplish is a huge barrier to stupid leadership screwing themselves sideways. Anyways, thats the optimist…

Unfortunately I think this is sort of the optimistic take. They will destroy themselves, but also take down a lot of other systems with them, just look at Musk. These things have a very long tail end for all of the accumulated problems to turn from a ripple to a tide.

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

#58

Post by immibis »

gottorf wrote: post #54
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…

> if you're going to talk about extremely verifiable information, like per-capita crime rates in American cities, then you should have your facts straight. To be fair, if his claim is "out of control crime" and you interpret it as "out of control crime rates", you're talking about different things. There's enough anecdotal evidence to suggest that in some big cities, the occurrence of certain kinds of crime (like car…

[flagged]

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

#59

Post by MattPalmer1086 »

com2kid wrote: post #47
MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #18

Ugh, I had a recruiter approach me a couple of years ago to work for some company that had a "radical openness" culture or something like that. The idea was supposedly that everyones ideas were valid and hierarchy didn't matter and that everyone should challenge anything no matter who they were in the organisation. The way they sold it sounded a bit culty to me, and the potential for abusive behaviour seemed high. Di…

> The idea was supposedly that everyones ideas were valid and hierarchy didn't matter and that everyone should challenge anything no matter who they were in the organisation. On the engineering side, ideally this is how things are done anyway. I've never had a problem digging into the ideas presented by engineers more senior than me, and I've always encouraged junior engineers to question any ideas I present. Everyon…

Most good places I've worked are like this naturally. Good ideas can come from anywhere, it just needs respect.

What put me off about this company was how they sold this as the central idea of their company. It made me wonder what made them think this needed to be pushed so strongly. I tend to be suspicious of overriding ideologies.

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