I did not intend to be offensive, only skeptical and cautious. I was pointing more to people's nature to erroneously construct narratives regarding cause and effect in their lives. We are all guilty of it, no doubt. I also don't think Dalio is being intentionally misleading. But, people tend to give less credit to chance and more credit to a very concrete chain of events that they can attribute a narrative to.
However, I think you bring up a fair criticism. It's worth reading, if nothing else, because of what Dalio has seen and experienced, situations I will likely never find myself in. As such, I would otherwise not learn firsthand how to react to or solve problems in such environments. Whether his association between actions and the outcomes are true is only part of the value of what he has written.
> I did not intend to be offensive, only skeptical and cautious.
Cool, that's perfectly reasonable.
> We are all guilty of it, no doubt.
This might sound facetious, but don't you see the contradiction here? Towards the proposition "These are the principles Dalio used to achieve success", you are skeptical. Towards the proposition "people erroneously construct narratives regarding cause and effect in their lives", you have no doubt that it applies to all people.
Why not apply skepticism towards the second proposition? Maybe somewhere on the planet are people who are able to examine their lives without constructing false narratives.
The reason I am not being facetious is that skepticism is extremely popular amongst intelligent people, but it leads to such contradictions in practice (e.g., "I know that all knowledge is biased").
I agree with the problem you raise and I don't have a good solution to the problem. This may invalidate my position.
However, per Kahneman, possibly some modes of thought are more susceptible to bias and to a greater magnitude than other modes of thought. This might allow for one to examine certain beliefs or actions based on one mode of thought with a higher degree of accuracy and lower susceptibility to bias than others.
This is getting off topic from the OP, but you raise an important issue that I think about often but don't have a good answer for. Thanks for the critical discussion.
Skepticism about other peoples' ideas and values is extremely popular among intelligent people. Skepticism about their own ideas and values? Not so much. Ditto skepticism about skepticism.
However, I think you bring up a fair criticism. It's worth reading, if nothing else, because of what Dalio has seen and experienced, situations I will likely never find myself in. As such, I would otherwise not learn firsthand how to react to or solve problems in such environments. Whether his association between actions and the outcomes are true is only part of the value of what he has written.