4 ms·

I stopped reading after that sentence, as I figured any such characterization immediately showed bias - your comment pretty much confirms my suspicions.

Matticus_Rex 6y ago
It shouldn't; they're very open to being shown to be wrong. That's a key feature in their company culture. They're just not shy about how they phrase their current beliefs.
- sebastien_b 6y ago
  Then they should really think about how they phrase their intentions. To me, this read like someone at a congressional hearing asking "Why are you against protecting children from predators?" to a witness opposing something on totally different grounds (ie. being needlessly confrontational from the get-go).
  - nostrademons 6y ago
    It's more like PG saying at AirBnB's interview: "People actually let strangers stay in their homes? What's wrong with them?" It's a zinger and a challenge to the person making the claims. Some people will be turned off by that and refuse to engage. In the particular domain that YCombinator and Bridgewater are working in - finding undervalued opportunities that everybody else is overlooking - this is a feature, not a bug. Anyone who's turned off by a simple offhand zinger or personal attack is not going to have the strength of their convictions when everybody is attacking them, which is usually what happens when you sincerely hold very unorthodox beliefs.
  - Matticus_Rex 6y ago
    Bridgewater doesn't need to convince their audience of their credibility. They're consistently one of the most profitable investment firms in the world. If they were just finding an audience, it might be necessary for them to temper their phrasing, but from their position it may be valuable to be intentionally provocative.
nostrademons 6y ago
They do this for the selection bias effect: they want to weed out anyone whose emotional reaction to the content will prevent them from engaging with the data and the reasoning in it. The company culture is based around radical transparency (within the firm, at least): say anything you want, criticize anyone, don't get mad about the criticism but instead engage with the information content contained in it. It's basically selecting for autists. (Sure enough, I have a college classmate who I'm pretty sure is on the spectrum, and he's thrived at Bridgewater.) This actually isn't a bad selection filter for an investment firm, since the #1 reason traders fail is investing on emotion.
- sebastien_b 6y ago
  > * They do this for the selection bias effect: they want to weed out anyone whose emotional reaction to the content will prevent them from engaging with the data and the reasoning in it.* To me that sounds like the perfect way to create an echo chamber.
  - meowkit 6y ago
    The exact opposite. Echo chambers shutdown heterodox thinking, Bridgewater apparently embraces it. They’re filtering out people who are most susceptible to getting stuck in groupthink.
    - notahacker 6y ago
      In this case they're filtering for readers who are susceptible to a particular type of groupthink: people who've read mostly positive stuff about Bitcoin and are inclined to believe it. It is impossible to argue with a straight face that glibly dismissing one side of an argument as "a few scared souls cowering in a corner" (as opposed to "most people") is a statement embracing heterodoxy. As pointed out in other subthreads, it's a marketing document targeted at people interested in Bitcoin, not a reflection of Bridgewater's internal culture. And having sucked in people who agree that "most people" seem to want to promote Bitcoin, the actual analysis is a lot more bearish than the Bitcoin-promoting stuff they're likely to have been reading anyway...

Matticus_Rex 6y ago

It shouldn't; they're very open to being shown to be wrong. That's a key feature in their company culture. They're just not shy about how they phrase their current beliefs.

sebastien_b 6y ago
Then they should really think about how they phrase their intentions. To me, this read like someone at a congressional hearing asking "Why are you against protecting children from predators?" to a witness opposing something on totally different grounds (ie. being needlessly confrontational from the get-go).
- nostrademons 6y ago
  It's more like PG saying at AirBnB's interview: "People actually let strangers stay in their homes? What's wrong with them?" It's a zinger and a challenge to the person making the claims. Some people will be turned off by that and refuse to engage. In the particular domain that YCombinator and Bridgewater are working in - finding undervalued opportunities that everybody else is overlooking - this is a feature, not a bug. Anyone who's turned off by a simple offhand zinger or personal attack is not going to have the strength of their convictions when everybody is attacking them, which is usually what happens when you sincerely hold very unorthodox beliefs.
- Matticus_Rex 6y ago
  Bridgewater doesn't need to convince their audience of their credibility. They're consistently one of the most profitable investment firms in the world. If they were just finding an audience, it might be necessary for them to temper their phrasing, but from their position it may be valuable to be intentionally provocative.

nostrademons 6y ago

They do this for the selection bias effect: they want to weed out anyone whose emotional reaction to the content will prevent them from engaging with the data and the reasoning in it. The company culture is based around radical transparency (within the firm, at least): say anything you want, criticize anyone, don't get mad about the criticism but instead engage with the information content contained in it. It's basically selecting for autists. (Sure enough, I have a college classmate who I'm pretty sure is on the spectrum, and he's thrived at Bridgewater.) This actually isn't a bad selection filter for an investment firm, since the #1 reason traders fail is investing on emotion.

sebastien_b 6y ago
> * They do this for the selection bias effect: they want to weed out anyone whose emotional reaction to the content will prevent them from engaging with the data and the reasoning in it.* To me that sounds like the perfect way to create an echo chamber.
- meowkit 6y ago
  The exact opposite. Echo chambers shutdown heterodox thinking, Bridgewater apparently embraces it. They’re filtering out people who are most susceptible to getting stuck in groupthink.
  - notahacker 6y ago
    In this case they're filtering for readers who are susceptible to a particular type of groupthink: people who've read mostly positive stuff about Bitcoin and are inclined to believe it. It is impossible to argue with a straight face that glibly dismissing one side of an argument as "a few scared souls cowering in a corner" (as opposed to "most people") is a statement embracing heterodoxy. As pointed out in other subthreads, it's a marketing document targeted at people interested in Bitcoin, not a reflection of Bridgewater's internal culture. And having sucked in people who agree that "most people" seem to want to promote Bitcoin, the actual analysis is a lot more bearish than the Bitcoin-promoting stuff they're likely to have been reading anyway...