Morningstar.com Reaffirms Its Ban on Honest Posting on Valuation-Related Topics

Tar42 determined that the timing was right to test whether the rift between the Vanguard Diehards community and the Bogleheads.org community had grown wide enough to permit a lifting of the ban on honest posting on valuation-related topics at the Vanguard Diehards board.

Juicy Excerpt: It’s always good to hear both sides of an issue, whether it be Taylor’s books or a counter opinion such as this.

Petro firmly nixed the idea. The post is gone, but you can pick up the general drift by reading the one by BillPerk.

Juicy Excerpt: If you really want to risk poking your eyes (and perhaps ears) out, try one of his 150 or so podcasts.

Sirschnitz nixed the nixing.

Juicy Excerpt: Rob’s and JWR’s active investing strategy using Shiller’s PE10 should have been fairly debated at the time, but wasn’t.

I thanked him for those kind words.

Full Text: Thanks for saying that. Russ. I think you have it exactly right. The key is permitting all points of view to be discussed. Here’s a passage from the book The Wisdom of Crowds that made a big impression on me: Mackay was right about the extremes of collective behavior: there are times–think of a riot, or a stock-market bubble—when aggregating individual decisions produces a collective decision that is utterly irrational. The stories of these kinds of mistakes are negative proofs of this book’s argument, underscoring the importance to good decision making of diversity and independence by demonstrating what happens when they’re missing. Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise. An intelligent group, especially when confronted with cognition problems, does not ask its members to modify their positions in order to let the group reach a decision everyone can be happy with. Instead, it figures out how to use mechanisms–like market prices, or intelligent voting systems–to aggregate and produce collective judgments that represent not what any one person in the group thinks but rather, in some sense what they all think. Petro is right, by the way, that I’ve never shot down any Germans and that I do indeed sometimes record those RobCasts in my pajamas!

Drip Guy freaked.

Full Text: Tar42 – shame on you. You do yourself and this board a diservice by pretending that the much-disgraced, much-debunked, and BANNED Robert Michael “Hocus” Bennett is merely a voice providing another view of theoretical questions The man is a scourge on the entire internet, was a long-time troll and distractor of any useful dialog here, and was finally, and correctly, outright run out of town on a rail due to his nasty ways. Since then, he has wandered from finance board to finance board, wearing out his welcome rapidly in every new venue — never for the novelty of his ideas or argument, but for the signal inability to follow norms and rules established at those sites. The man is a complete flake. A crank. For you to bring up a thread solely designed to draw attention to this BANNED poster is beyond the pale. At some boards, even referencing banned posters is verbotten, and for good reason. If they were so noxious to the dialog, to the culture, to the body of the otherwise healthy board, why invite the disease back in? Shame. I am very disappointed. Hell, next thing you know, Rob will be getting a logon back, and here we go again!

I’ll post the text of my e-mail correspondence with Morningtar.com that followed (in which I was re-banned on grounds that the language of the post quoted above (the one quoting the book The Wisdom of Crowds, not the one referring to a fellow community member as a “scourge on the entire internet”) is “inflammatory”) in Thursday’s blog entry.