Their successes teach us that a purely utilitarian argument is not enough to dislodge a deeply embedded social system that serves the interests of the few rather than the many. While data can crack the ice, real progress is possible only when hearts begin to melt.
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We must be no less radical in rethinking the foundations of human organizations. Like our forebears, we must do our part to emancipate the human spirit. It is here we find a cause worth servingâto build organizations that give every human being the opportunity to thrive.
In Dalioâs view, believability-based decision making âŚ
Eliminates what I believe to be one of the greatest tragedies of mankind, and that is people arrogantly, naively holding opinions in their minds that are wrong, and acting on them, and not putting them out there to stress test them. Collective decision-making is so much better than individual decision-making if itâs done well. Itâs been the secret sauce behind our success. Itâs why weâve made more money for our clients than any other hedge fund in existence and made money 23 out of the last 26 years.
Future people count. There could be a lot of them. We can make their lives go better.
This is the case for longtermism in a nutshell. The premises are simple, and I donât think theyâre particularly controversial. Yet taking them seriously amounts to a moral revolutionâone with far-reaching implications for how activists, researchers, policy makers, and indeed all of us should think and act.
For some people in the study, making the economics work proved relatively easy, whereas for others it proved much more difficult. Family wealth served as a significant means to pursue a hedgehog in only six of the 34 lives we studied, whereas in ten of 34 cases people endured at least one significant phase of scarcity while in pursuit of a hedgehog. Yet whether easy or difficult (or somewhere in between), they committed to focus their inner fire in line with their encodings and they figured out how to make the economics work.
A friend once said of my earlier work that I wrote with a signature of âwell-founded hope.â The mountains of systematic research, combined with my dedication to drawing insights from the evidence, provided the âwell-foundedâ part. âBut the message is always hopeful,â he said. âYou demonstrate with evidence that good can become great, that people can build organizations worthy of lasting, that strong values can win in a hypercompetitive world.â Well-founded hope. This study only added to that signature for me. It made me feel even more hopeful and optimistic, not directly about the world at large, but about people. And people, after all, make the world.