Page 235 - Ray Dalio - Principles

You can use your own principles, or you can use others’;
you just want to use the best ones possible well. If you think
that way constantly, you will become an excellent principled

thinker.

5.10 Believability weight your decision

making

I have found triangulating with highly believable people who
are willing to have thoughtful disagreements has never failed
to enhance my learning and sharpen the quality of my decision
making. It typically leads me to make better decisions than I
could have otherwise and it typically provides me with
thrilling learning. I urge you to do it.

To do it well, be sure to avoid the common perils of: 1)
valuing your own believability more than is logical and 2) not
distinguishing between who is more or less credible.

In case of a disagreement with others, start by seeing if you
can agree on the principles that should be used to make that
decision. This discussion should include exploring the merits
of the reasoning behind the different principles. If you agree

on them, apply them to the case at hand and you’ll arrive at a
conclusion everyone agrees on. If you disagree on the
principles, try to work through your disagreement based on
your respective believabilities. I will explain how we do this in
more detail in Work Principles.

This sort of principled and believability-weighted decision

making is fascinating and leads to much different and much
better decision making than is typical. For example, imagine if
we used this approach to choose the president. It would be
fascinating to see which principles we would come up with
both for determining what makes a good president as well as
for deciding who is most believable in making such
determinations. Would we wind up with something like one
person one vote, or something different? And if different, in

what ways? It certainly would lead to very different outcomes.