Page 465 - Ray Dalio - Principles

• Participants continuously record their assessments of each
other by giving them “dots,” positive or negative, on any
number of several dozen attributes. These dots are laid out

in a grid that updates dynamically, so that everyone in the
conversation can see one another’s thinking as the meeting
progresses. Doing this helps people shift their perspectives
from being stuck in their own heads with their own
opinions to looking down on everyone’s views. Seeing
things through everyone’s eyes naturally causes most
people to adopt the higher-level view in which they

recognize that their own perspective is just one of many,
so they ask themselves which criteria are best for deciding
how to resolve the issue at hand. In this way it promotes
open-minded, idea-meritocratic, collective decision
making.

• It helps people make better decisions by providing advice
in the same way a GPS does. By taking data on what

everyone in the room is like, the app is able to give people
individualized coaching, which is especially important
when their own opinions are unlikely to be right. We have
found that helping people through such times can be
invaluable.

• The Dot Collector highlights what we call “nubby
questions”—cases where the pattern of answers and

attributes of people on different sides of an issue suggest
that there’s an important disagreement to be resolved. For
example, it will alert you automatically if you disagree
with the believability- weighted majority on a given issue
and give you guidance on the appropriate steps to take to

resolve that disagreement in an evidence-based way.
• It enables believability-weighted voting. The Dot

Collector provides both a polling interface where people
can vote yes or no (or provide a numerical rating) and a
back-end system of believability weighting, which allows
us to look at vote results on both equal-weighted and
believability-weighted bases, not as just simple majorities

but also based on which way the people whose views have
the most merit voted. While this may sound complicated,
it’s simply a way of helping people keep track of