Why Does Ray Dalio Say Written Principles Beat One-off Decisions?

Ray Dalio told Gary Vaynerchuk that he wrote down the criteria for every decision, and those notes became his principles. Saying them let him use the same rules with a partner, with family, and at Bridgewater Associates, where the best idea is supposed to win. They later turned the rules into algorithms. A principle, he said, is how you handle something that happens again and again: skiing, raising children, or investing. You recognize the pattern and you already know the move. He had worried that readers of his book Principles would find this too abstract. He was surprised they could connect a repeated event to a written rule.