The fallacy with dismissing Dalio's advice as survivorship bias, is that building a successful business isn't a one-shot deal. It's not like 100 investment managers all start out with different philosophies, their cards are dealt, and years later we find that 50 have turned a profit and 5 have become super-wealthy.

Building an organisation the size of Bridgewater involves many, many sub-challenges. How do find an opening with this client? How about this other client? How do you close a deal with this client? How about this client? One client now has an issue we're not able to solve. How do you retain them? How do you build a system to manage the sales pipeline and client relations?

Who do you recruit for this position? How do you interview them? How do you track for bad hires? How do you train interviewers so you avoid future bad hires? How do you build a system to handle recruiting and HR issues?

How do you train new hires? How do you decide who to promote? How do you minimise office politics? How do you handle conflicts between managers and teams? Etc, etc, you get the idea.

Once you've faced similar issues multiple times, you can track failures and successes, and figure out the essential actions which usually lead to success in that particular field. These essential rules are principles. Over time you identify meta-principles which apply to all fields (e.g., "be rational", or "avoid wishful thinking").

I assume you didn't intend to be offensive, but your attitude boils down to "someone smart and extremely successful has taken the time to identify what they believe to be the factors behind their success, and I'm going to dismiss their opinion without reading it, because I've decided, a priori, that they must be delusional, and I regard this a-priori reasoning as the scientific and rigorous approach".