I stopped reading after that sentence, as I figured any such characterization immediately showed bias - your comment pretty much confirms my suspicions.
It shouldn't; they're very open to being shown to be wrong. That's a key feature in their company culture. They're just not shy about how they phrase their current beliefs.
Then they should really think about how they phrase their intentions.
To me, this read like someone at a congressional hearing asking "Why are you against protecting children from predators?" to a witness opposing something on totally different grounds (ie. being needlessly confrontational from the get-go).
It's more like PG saying at AirBnB's interview: "People actually let strangers stay in their homes? What's wrong with them?"
It's a zinger and a challenge to the person making the claims. Some people will be turned off by that and refuse to engage. In the particular domain that YCombinator and Bridgewater are working in - finding undervalued opportunities that everybody else is overlooking - this is a feature, not a bug. Anyone who's turned off by a simple offhand zinger or personal attack is not going to have the strength of their convictions when everybody is attacking them, which is usually what happens when you sincerely hold very unorthodox beliefs.
Bridgewater doesn't need to convince their audience of their credibility. They're consistently one of the most profitable investment firms in the world. If they were just finding an audience, it might be necessary for them to temper their phrasing, but from their position it may be valuable to be intentionally provocative.
They do this for the selection bias effect: they want to weed out anyone whose emotional reaction to the content will prevent them from engaging with the data and the reasoning in it. The company culture is based around radical transparency (within the firm, at least): say anything you want, criticize anyone, don't get mad about the criticism but instead engage with the information content contained in it. It's basically selecting for autists. (Sure enough, I have a college classmate who I'm pretty sure is on the spectrum, and he's thrived at Bridgewater.)
This actually isn't a bad selection filter for an investment firm, since the #1 reason traders fail is investing on emotion.
> * They do this for the selection bias effect: they want to weed out anyone whose emotional reaction to the content will prevent them from engaging with the data and the reasoning in it.*
To me that sounds like the perfect way to create an echo chamber.
In this case they're filtering for readers who are susceptible to a particular type of groupthink: people who've read mostly positive stuff about Bitcoin and are inclined to believe it. It is impossible to argue with a straight face that glibly dismissing one side of an argument as "a few scared souls cowering in a corner" (as opposed to "most people") is a statement embracing heterodoxy.
As pointed out in other subthreads, it's a marketing document targeted at people interested in Bitcoin, not a reflection of Bridgewater's internal culture. And having sucked in people who agree that "most people" seem to want to promote Bitcoin, the actual analysis is a lot more bearish than the Bitcoin-promoting stuff they're likely to have been reading anyway...
I don't take "a few scared souls cowering in a corner" as a put down. It's a tongue in cheek comment about the massive (monstrous) growth of BTC. The only people who would take that seriously and get offended are people with preconceived notions. Most people would just find it humorous.
I had never heard of Bridgewater; I had no opinion about them either way. Was more than willing to read up on their "thoughts on Bitcoin". But immediately going down that hole with such a characterization will not encourage me to engage or evaluate their thoughts objectively. Had they used 'skeptics' I certainly would have kept reading (though I suspect there's probably half a dozen or more similar characterizations in the text).
You can call it an emotional response on my part if you want (I don't see it that way), but I'd counter their own characterization shows emotional aspects on their part as well.
Oh, I don't think it's likely to cause offence, I just think it's a bit of a daft comment. Same as an article which opened with a tongue in cheek comment about Bitcoin's growth showing a bright future for ransomware shouldn't really be triggering any cryptoenthusiasts, but I'm sure they'd feel justified in skipping the article, whilst r/buttcoiners would be delighted that someone else gets it (and maybe get suckered into reading the analysis bits about buying Asset X instead)