I really enjoyed this essay (and have made a note in my little Moleskin I carry everywhere to pay more attention to Escaping Flatland).
It’s full of observations and insights I’ll be chewing on for days at least but what strikes me immediately is the exhilaration of the love story: certainly I’ve known for a long time that I wanted something like that even if I wouldn’t have used those words. And I applied a crude heuristic: I only got seriously involved with partners who were in some important sense smarter than I am, but I think this essay has given me words for something I intuited long ago but never quite got by the scruff, which is that only once or twice if that did that represent a person who made me better at becoming better, and it was long enough ago I didn’t realize the gravity of that in time to make the necessary choices.
The exhilaration derives from remembering what a game changer that represents when you encounter it, and for me at least how all the brighter colors and incandescent bliss and endless possibility and so many other unpronounceable intangibles that falling truly in love represented.
There’s something magical here and the authors have succeeded in setting at least one pen to paper (and physical paper at that) trying to pull on a thread long neglected.
The article has its own blindspot, which is to understand the problem as a blindspot - as a lack of information due to some (remediable) deficiency.
But the story showed it was instead a matter of will, or agency. His girlfriend obviously knew she could learn; she just needed to decide that it was her job to learn instead of depending on others to teach.
Indeed, nearly every story on point (like the comment about Bridgewater practices) purports to be about information (delivering unwanted news), but is in fact about the will to change.
This is important because there's a ton of advice out there, and people who feel that giving advice is how they can help. But often that makes things worse: the person already feels disabled, and advice not taken basically conveys that they're faulty - disabled.
Greek philosophers argued about the phenomenon of akrasia (weakness of will), generally falling into the same trap that we do, thinking knowledge will somehow solve it. But there's actually plenty of evidence that more knowledge constrains your sense of possibility.
Mechanistic psychologists might argue for impedance-matching: challenging people without breaking them, so they achieve a rate of change above their expectations - but then expectations change. (Successful and powerful people are notoriously unhappy that their trajectories are not increasing.) Conversely, buddhists say to expect nothing and accept everything; then people become happy but low-achieving.
Sometimes what really helps is to show someone that they can change. As the story suggests, love itself, and bringing someone out of a small town, helps. As the Bridgewater comment and the 2010's workplace suggests, joining some group where peers are humble and activated can be inspiring. Therapy suggests realizing that all your fears are self-generated delusions that disappear when you stop pumping energy into them. (Nietzsche's spirit of gravity is a monkey on the shoulder, that eventually hops off.)
So perhaps the best of all is the advice above, to notice whether you're more yourself when with certain people. Those people Aristotle would call your friends; in the Nichomachean ethics friendship is the highest form of happiness because we're most actualized among those who get/demand/expect/elicit the most from us.
This is one of the most powerful things you can learn to do. Question your own assumptions, with the goal of seeing what is holding you back. It literally unblocks you and allows you to do things you never considered doing before.
One of the main things that attracted me to working at Bridgewater is the company culture geared explicitly at helping you discover your blind spots.
A lot of the discomfort that people associate with the company has to do with that: the recorded meetings, the “brutal” feedback etc are all designed to make you see what you have been resisting seeing.
There is a part of us that wants to grow and there’s a part of us that resists the pain of growth. Being someone who values growth and is willing to go through the discomfort doesn’t make the process itself easier for you - you still have to do the work. It’s challenging but in retrospect you look at the kind of person you are a year or five years down the line and you feel good about it.
I do think there's a downside to this culture, or at least something to guard against. It works when there is a clear intention to improve, but there can also be a tendency towards negativity and downright cynicism. Sometimes, "brutal" feedback becomes a mechanism of maintaining the status quo rather than fostering growth. It reminds me of the Oscal Wilde quote to the effect of "a cynic is someone who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing." It creates a lack of psychological safety, where people are afraid to speak up with different ideas and the culture stagnates.
That’s a great hypothetical that may apply in some places. What made Bridgewater a one in a million company is precisely that we all opted in to operating in this transparent and “harsh” way.
I never worked at a place with as much “psychological safety” as BW because the culture was explicitly “you must say what is in your mind”. Every other place that I heard talk about psychological safety has so much walking on eggshells that real problems couldn’t be called out.
> What made Bridgewater a one in a million company is precisely that we all opted in to operating in this transparent and “harsh” way.
I find this very hard to believe. I can buy that everyone knows, and even accepts, the risks coming in, but that doesn't mean that everyone opts into it, except in the weakest possible sense of opting in (the sense in which I opt in to cookie collection, for example, but weaker—because I just want to get to a website, whereas the people 'opting in' to this feedback system have to get a job, and may not have the resources to pick and choose).
// whereas the people 'opting in' to this feedback system have to get a job, and may not have the resources to pick and choose
That's just not what it is in practice. The kinds of people these companies hire have a lot of choices. Nobody is in position where the only company that will hire them is the world's premier and most selective hedge fund.
In reality most people who entered BW, were either "poached" from top-tier financial firms (and more recently FAANGS) or were graduates of top schools who had other offers. Materially nobody faces the choice between unemployment and "living the principles" - people opt into BW from among their choices because the culture appeals to them.
By your own admission though, BW is considered the “premier” hedge fund. So I’d be willing to bet some people dislike the culture but find it a worthwhile tradeoff for the status of working at BW. I’ve witnessed a similar dynamic at organizations like NASA. In private, people will talk about how they don’t much like the culture but find it hard to take a different job because it feels like a step down on the status ladder. Human incentives and biases can’t all be distilled to a simple model of “it must be a great culture or else people with options would leave”
I have a hard time imagining that it's truly brutal in both directions. Is the executive team really made to justify a large bonus for themselves when the rest of the staff is asked to accept lower than inflation adjustments, as an example?
I'd bet it's "brutal" but with a lot of information asymmetry preventing the sorts of feedback I described.
I've worked at a small place with "radical candor" (it's a book) and how I think about it is like working with power tools while walking on a tightrope. It's really easy to screw up and cut off someone's hand, and I think bridgewater fires a lot AFAIK or has a lot of turn over as a result.
Another thing is that it can easily make people pretty defensive, and you need very mature and forgiving/accepting people or rough and tumble culture (think Linus Torvalds) for it work properly. It's very easy to hide emotions with intellectual rationalizations unfortunately.
I also think it can be very useful and push to excellence, but most IMO don't have the emotional maturity to pull it off properly. I think it's the same reason why a lot of startups die because of cofounder conflict.
Can you clarify? I took the GP comment as asking whether subordinate employees give leadership negative feedback. That's a very different animal than general public feedback. I think that distinction is important because internal feedback tends to be much more relevant due to the amount of non-public information employees have. I suspect the GP point was that "brutal" feedback tends to flow downhill within an organization.
Would you expect a custodian to be able to talk to Dalio and say something like, "You know, your desk looks like a pigsty and a cluttered environment can lead to a cluttered mind and cluttered thinking."
// Would you expect a custodian to be able to talk to Dalio and say something like, "You know, your desk looks like a pigsty and a cluttered environment can lead to a cluttered mind and cluttered thinking."
Absolutely!
Take a look at rays Ted talk for a few examples. They are representative.
You have to understand why someone would find this surprising though right? Its counter to all human nature I have observed. It's like telling me you have water running uphill on your property, I'm right to have questions, the most reasonable explanation is some sort of trickery is at play.
// It's like telling me you have water running uphill on your property, I'm right to have questions, the most reasonable explanation is some sort of trickery is at play.
Skepticism is one thing but it's good not let it blind you to exceptionally good situations you can learn from.
Instead of your water running uphill analogy - I'd use marriage. Most marriage ends in divorce today, but if you see a couple that has been successfully married for decades, do you go "that must be bullshit" or do you go "I wonder what they are doing that others aren't doing" and seek to learn from that for your own life.
FWIW I am a Bridgewater alumni and can attest to the absolute ease of giving negative upward feedback - but you can also look at the outcomes. World's most successful hegefund across 4 decades, a highly desirable place to work, and a place where alumni "graduate" from to be massively successful elsewhere. Does that sound like "just another place where my cynical world view applies" or does it sound like "a place that has actually figured out something special and is able to stand out against the backdrop" - and thus is worthy to learn from?
It's funny to have to say this in a thread about explicit feedback and psychological safety, but:
Nobody here was suggesting that your question was foolish or that it was not asked in earnest surprise. Clearly, this is something that surprises you and that's fine. Good on you for asking questions to better understand!
Encountering something that is "counter to all human nature I have observed" is a good clue that you've been carrying a big a blindspot of your own. There are many traditional cultures and modern communities that are quite forward about feedback and criticism in a pervasive way. Often, in these groups, continued authority is earned exactly through one's handling of open criticism from their subordinates.
Do you process it in stride and contextualize it? Acknowledge the person for sharing it? Hold strong in your own self-assurance? Fold it into your future decisions? Or do you defensively fly off the handle and repress those who you see as threatening you?
I'm sorry if you're only familiar with that last strategy, but it's not nearly universal. In this case, the water really does flow uphill in a lot of places.
I am not the person you're replying to but I reached the same conclusion that they have. When someone claims as impossible that which you have experienced (and in fact, experienced consistently across decades) - at some point you have to conclude that they simply lack the experience that would make this as obvious to them. It's not a bad thing but it's just kinda real.
It's like the opposite of survivorship bias. Because you have only seen things go badly, you conclude the good is impossible, something like that.
I did not read the original comment as "claims as impossible" but rather "not very generalizable". One of the important things about receiving feedback IMO is to steelman the feedback as much as possible.
I don't know if I agree with the first statement, but I agree that leadership plays a big role.
I think psychological safety is the opposite of what you described. According to Adam Grant, it's the ability to give candid feedback without interpersonal risk. Related to my original comment, it's the ability to share ideas, even half-baked ones, without fear that they will define you as a person. The downside to "brutal" feedback is when people conflate the idea with the person sharing it.
I was a software intern at Bridgewater in 2013. My impressions from that time are that Bridgewater had an interesting, unique, and very intentional culture, but at some point the firm grew and Dalio started thinking about how to scale that culture. He wrote the Principles book and had everyone read and discuss it; the Dots app was implemented; etc.
The core cultural values seemed reasonable to me, but the efforts to scale the culture felt heavyhanded and seemed like they sometimes backfired. Attempting to quantify someone's "believability" based on subjective data collected on an iPad app was a bit silly and easily gameable. The fact that Dalio and other executives scored highest on basically every facet was an obvious sign that the system was a bit farcical.
Maybe the company managed to solve some of those cultural scaling challenges after 2013? I wasn't around to see what happened after.
If fact there was active work to make Dalio top on believability and have it flow from there. The developer behind it is extensively interviewed in "The Firm."
Dalio and others being on top of rating was a way Dalio sanity checked the algo, per the book and was not happy when it drifted away from that standard.
How much of the book's content is shaded by sour grapes is unclear though.
The Fund is a great read and I'm sure it only painting a certain side of the story. But it made all the talked about Bridgewater stuff sound like a complicated distraction for a founder with some specific vision that was a bit odd. Meanwhile the working of the actual fund is based on hunches, insider gossip and large macro bets run by a very small team, while everyone is playing complicated status games.
I didn’t read the fund but I read some of the articles released based on it when it published and it rang hollow to me.
It had the vibe of a couch potato writing about an Olympic team complaining “look how harsh the coach is” - divorced from the reality of what it takes to be an Olympic athlete and that the athletes signed up for that kind of training.
The fund is based on interviews with people who were pretty senior there. I mean, they no longer do, and the book is clearly giving things a negative light, but you can learn a lot from it about who can give who 'Brutal Feedback' and how a utopian vision becomes a dystopia for people further down the chain.
I did work there for two years within the investment engine - the old school core. It was a very transformative two years both as a professional and as a person so I got what I came for.
I got fired. That sounds "bad" but part of working there is that you have to be sober about the reality and are willing to just engage with it as is.
The reality is that my department was people-rich and pretty mature, so when COVID hit and the company looked to lean up, it looked to my area to trim. Out of my peer group, I am pretty sure I was the least valuable (I am excellent at what I do but I was the lest excellent in my peer group there) so I was let go.
It was technically a lay-off but I am sober about the fact that I was chosen for the layoff because of my relative performance, which makes sense.
(FWIW I was given a very comfortable severance package, I would even say very generous and I suspect some of that generosity was because I had recently had a child. While BW is a place that is "brutal" in terms of high expectations and feedback, it absolutely took care of people in this way.)
I currently like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_space antimatroid model; think of it as a graph, or like tech/skill-trees in video games. Sometimes you can unlock a new skill simply by combining (taking the meet of) two skills you already have mastered (X ∨ Y = Z); other times the only way to get to a (join irreducible?) new skill is to make some sort of 'leap' from a single existing skill; these are much more difficult because (Y ∨ Y = Y) so you need inspiration to get from Y to Z.
This is very well written. Aside from the topic at hand, I had a realization that an essay written in this manner (from the context I assume with input from at least two people) feels as if written by superhuman, combining the individual insights of each into a greater, more insightful whole. It's obvious, I suppose, but this idea had never crystallized for me before reading this.
Knowing is one thing, wanting is another, and then there is acting. Sometimes it is peaceful to embrace who you are. Sometimes it is liberating to push to your limits. Most of the time, I'm giving myself excuse to be lazy
> When I met Johanna, far from there, in a university town, she made a deep and perplexing impression on me: the precision of her attention and the intensity of her curiosity were unlike anything I had seen, and yet, despite this, she was almost completely ignorant. If I mentioned the First World War, she would say, “When was that?” But if I explained an area I was researching, it would take her five minutes to cut through to the deep, underlying question that had eluded me for months.
Knowledge and intelligence are orthogonal concepts. It's important not to conflate them.
I swing between my comfort zone, and growth mindset. Sometimes projects just become maintenance mode for a while, other times I expand my knowledge, try new things, learn from mistakes. You have to have a beginner's mind, and be willing to look pathetic on your first try and leave ego at the door. Become vulnerable.
It’s full of observations and insights I’ll be chewing on for days at least but what strikes me immediately is the exhilaration of the love story: certainly I’ve known for a long time that I wanted something like that even if I wouldn’t have used those words. And I applied a crude heuristic: I only got seriously involved with partners who were in some important sense smarter than I am, but I think this essay has given me words for something I intuited long ago but never quite got by the scruff, which is that only once or twice if that did that represent a person who made me better at becoming better, and it was long enough ago I didn’t realize the gravity of that in time to make the necessary choices.
The exhilaration derives from remembering what a game changer that represents when you encounter it, and for me at least how all the brighter colors and incandescent bliss and endless possibility and so many other unpronounceable intangibles that falling truly in love represented.
There’s something magical here and the authors have succeeded in setting at least one pen to paper (and physical paper at that) trying to pull on a thread long neglected.