“It Is Always Hard to Move from One System of Thought to Another. It Is Harder Than Usual When Making the Transition Requires That Lots of Powerful People Give Up (Temporarily — But Still) Some of Their Power and Their Ability to Generate Huge Sums of Money for Themselves.”

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to another blog entry at this site:

You also fail to address the fact it would require mass conspiracy as well as the disregard by all with respect to their individual levels of respect and credibility.

I don’t think it requires mass conspiracy, Questions.

It involves a huge advance in our understanding of how stock investing works, an advance so big that people cannot come to terms with it without first being permitted to talk it through a bit. And it also involves a lot of money. It is always hard to move from one system of thought to another. It is harder than usual when making the transition requires that lots of powerful people give up (temporarily –but still) some of their power and their ability to generate huge sums of money for themselves.

I like the civil rights analogy. But there are lots of other analogies that could be used. When Galileo discovered that it is the earth that revolves around the sun rather than the other way around, there were lots of powerful people who tried to shut him down. The first reaction of established orders to challenges to their pre-eminance is to attack those bringing the challenges. That’s just the way it is with those darn humans.

I think YOU are the one suspending rational thought, Questions. You are the one going to prison, not me. The fact that you have placed yourself in circumstances where you will be going to prison because some fellow you don’t even know personally happened to post honestly about the numbers that millions of middle-class people use to plan their retirements should tell you something. The idea that stock investing is a 100 percent rational endeavor has certainly been disproven in your case. No?

I say that it is not just you. It’s fair to say that you are an extreme case. But I believe that all of us humans are subject to the same influences. During the Buy-and-Hold years, we haven’t been doing anything to address the effect of those influences on our long-term investing returns. The peer-reviewed academic research shows us that, if we start doing that, we will be able to reduce the risk of investing by 70 percent. I say we should go for it. That sounds like very good news indeed to my ears.

Please take good care, my old friend.

Rob