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veszig 's review for:
Principles: Life and Work
by Ray Dalio
Interesting read. The principles themselves are mostly common sense in today's modern companies. What's intriguing is that a guy with a financial background built a company (and life) managed by algorithms. As an engineer I feel I constantly have a Ray Dalio with devil's horns on one of my shoulders and I struggle to listen to the other guy as well that tells me to be more empathetic and that people aren't robots. :) So yeah, the principles are cool, in an ideal world we would live like this but people have feelings, we are imperfect, so it must be really frustrating to constantly feel that you're not as good as a robot would be.
The other big thing I'm missing from the book is that it doesn't address unconscious biases. Basically they "teach" systems which people are credible by collecting opinions from people. The problem is that people have unconscious biases. For example most people believe that women are worse engineers than men. If we tell our biased opinions to computers and they learn these judgements, we are encoding prejudice in our decision making processes. Meritocracy sounds like the ideal system, but once again, we aren't robots, so we have to take human imperfections into account as well.
In general it's a really interesting book, I'm happy I've read it and I already had several interesting discussions based on the book, but I don't think it had a significant impact on what I'll do in the future.
The other big thing I'm missing from the book is that it doesn't address unconscious biases. Basically they "teach" systems which people are credible by collecting opinions from people. The problem is that people have unconscious biases. For example most people believe that women are worse engineers than men. If we tell our biased opinions to computers and they learn these judgements, we are encoding prejudice in our decision making processes. Meritocracy sounds like the ideal system, but once again, we aren't robots, so we have to take human imperfections into account as well.
In general it's a really interesting book, I'm happy I've read it and I already had several interesting discussions based on the book, but I don't think it had a significant impact on what I'll do in the future.