I think the problem here is that we assume that people that are "smart" in one thing are smart in everything and this is not true at all. People "smarts" seem to be very specific and the myth of the "Renaissance man/polymath genius" is very uncommon.

>how people walk the line between idiot and smart so freely.

Lack of immediate repercussions, is what I've seen in my life.

I can explain this as a former BW employee who knows the people involved. Ray's whole thing is intellectual humility:

“Before I begin telling you what I think, I want to establish that I’m a “dumb shit” who doesn’t know much relative to what I need to know. Whatever success I’ve had in life has had more to do with my knowing how to deal with my not knowing than anything I know.” [0]

One of the concepts for dealing with this is "believability weighting." ie: you may think we should do X, and I think we should do Y, but if out of the two of us, you're the one who's solved this problem - we weigh your opinion more.

So what Ray is doing here, is reminding Karen to be intellectually humble - in response to her asserting an opinion. Kinda like "don't believe everything you think." He's saying it in this way because logically "if you knew everything, you'd win every single trade and be ridiculously rich"

(to be clear, Karen was co-head of research at the time and quite wealthy)

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9871858-before-i-begin-tell...

> So what Ray is doing here, is reminding Karen to be intellectually humble - in response to her asserting an opinion. Kinda like "don't believe everything you think." He's saying it in this way because logically "if you knew everything, you'd win every single trade and be ridiculously rich"

Sure, but it's possible to do that without purposely trying to be provocative. Being correct doesn't excuse being a jerk.

At BW this would not be considered provocative. We optimized for the most direct/impactful communication. It wasn't meant to wound people's feelings per se - but using the feelings and dealing with them was part of the toolkit.

Some of my biggest personal growth at BW happened from conversations w my boss that were very difficult emotionally.

> At BW this would not be considered provocative. We optimized for the most direct/impactful communication. It wasn't meant to wound people's feelings per se - but using the feelings and dealing with them was part of the toolkit.

Sorry, I don't buy this. I don't discount your experiences and the fact that you enjoyed this environment, but there's nothing inherent about directness that requires personal insults. If anything, his insults were _less_ direct than saying what he actually meant, as evidenced by the need for your previous comment explaining "what he actually meant was...". The direct way to say "remember, you might not know the whole situation here" is not "don't be simpleminded; if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?", it's literally just stating what you mean.

You can formulate a culture around purposely being rude while still being correct, and you might even be successful, but it's not the same as making a culture around being direct, and it's disingenuous to claim otherwise.

In my experience, pointless meanness was not tolerated at BW whatsoever. Pointed messaging was encouraged. The fact that I had to explain this to you is because you're an outsider and not used to the culture. Karen I am sure was not put off.

Here's Karen talking about the culture btw. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_ipFnQ05L0

> The fact that I had to explain this to you is because you're an outsider and not used to the culture.

I agree with this, but to me, that's additional evidence that it's not "direct" communication. It's not like Bridgewater is some sort of foreign society or something; it's company a company that's existed for several decades in the American northeast, and I'm a person who's lived for several decades in the American northeast.

> Karen I am sure was not put off.

Sure, I imagine that if she were unhappy with the way he phrased it enough then she wouldn't have been working there at such a high position in the first place.

I recognize that I was a bit unclear about what I "didn't buy" in my previous comment; I can believe that the specific quote wasn't said in a context meant to be hurtful, but I think it's disingenuous to describe it as "optimized for the direct/impactful communication". It sounds more like the company purposely calibrated the amount of rudeness in communication higher as the new norm and considered it a virtue. Ultimately, it's not really my concern what communication is like internally in a private company I'm not affiliated with, but it's already far too common for people to try to ignore decorum in places they are trying to participate by claiming "I just tell it like it is", so I feel strongly that this sort of mischaracterization is important to point out. People are responsible for more than just what they say, but _how_ they say it, and claiming that personal insults are somehow necessary for direct communication is a fallacy that can be used to help avoid that.

BW made a big point to distinguish between pointless rudeness and “shocking” directness.

One guy lost it in a meeting and was immediately called out for being a jackass to the person he was talking to. The calling out was the “directness” and he had to go think about that. Pointless rudeness was not tolerated.

> At BW this would not be considered provocative. We optimized for the most direct/impactful communication. It wasn't meant to wound people's feelings per se - but using the feelings and dealing with them was part of the toolkit.

I'd love to see the psychological research which backs up this approach -- because there's a lot of research which suggests that tailoring your communication to the individual is generally a good idea, and that being confrontational can have significant negative consequences.

Furthermore, "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" is just a patently bad take. Being smart and being rich don't exactly have a correlation coefficient of 1. In fact, the top 1% are generally less intelligent than those just above median income[0].

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/02/230208125113.h...

.Charismatic leader? Cult-like redefinition of language? These things rarely correlate to anything good.

Good man! For your defence of the dear leader, ̶S̶o̶c̶i̶a̶l̶ ̶c̶r̶e̶d̶i̶t̶ ̶s̶c̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶ dots = dots + 1

If you're curious, the goal of the dots[0] is not a score but to create a portrait of your strengths and weaknesses, as an input to you for what to improve on, and to others for what to rely on you or not. The dots were along various personality attributes. For example, I was very high on "assertive and openminded at the same time" but very low on "organized and reliable." One obvious use of such things is that I can decide if I want to work on being more organized and reliable, or if I really need to be guard-railed with a pure project manager working alongside me.

[0] https://www.ted.com/talks/ray_dalio_how_to_build_a_company_w...

If this dogma catches on, knowledge workers will end up suffering under the yoke of information age Taylorism. This nonsense must be crushed early, lest all companies end up looking like coinbase and BW. BW works because they are willing to pay top dollar for people to play along and pander to the management, but please don't spread this nonsense to the rest of the tech world.

I didn't find that anyone stuck around BW for the money. The money was good but the caliber of folks that could get jobs there could get good offers elsewhere.

People had appetite to engage this way.

thank you, interesting to hear inside anecdotes.

I feel compelled to respond, "If you're so rich, why aren't you smart?" 'coz your premise is flawed.

You're missing context. In the stock market, you get paid for believing/knowing things others don't. Ray is calling that "smart"ness.

If you know better than anyone else, there's a fortune to be made on Wall Street. A problem is that the way he uses "smart" is not in line with how non-financial people think, so when these phrases/anecdotes escape their context it sounds... uh... the way it does.

Sure, there might be a better way to phrase what he's saying. But he's not wrong.

(Separately, there's a reason why tweets with 500 words of qualifiers and "it depends" and "YMMV" don't catch on. Brevity counts, especially when reminding people that they don't/can't know everything compared to The Market.)