Buy-and-Hold Goon to Rob: “Your Classic Crank Mistake Is Assuming That Second Brain (Yours) Is in Any Way Remotely Equal to Shiller’s. He’s a Nobel Winner, You Barely Understand Basic Arithmetic. Your Supposed Insights About “What Follows Logically From What Shiller Said” Are Utterly Worthless.”

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

“There is a second brain involved.”

Your classic crank mistake is assuming that second brain (yours) is in any way remotely equal to Shiller’s. He’s a Nobel winner, you barely understand basic arithmetic. Your supposed insights about “what follows logically from what Shiller said” are utterly worthless.

Does anyone care what some high school kid thinks of Einstein’s work? Even if he writes lots of papers about Einstein? Of course not. And so it is with you and Shiller. He’s the real deal, you’re the wannabe. This fact is completely obvious to everyone. No crash will ever change that reality.

I don’t buy it, Anonymous.

I worked with Wade Pfau for 16 months. We exchanged scores and scores of e-mails. He praised my work to the skies. This is a fellow with a Ph.D. in Economics. And he told me that he learned things from me that he had never learned in all those years of schooling. He checked Valuation-Informed Indexing out every which way to Sunday and concluded that: “Yes, Virginia — Valuation-Informed Indexing Works!”

And of course Wade is not the only one. Rob Arnott said that all my stuff checks out. Carl Richards said that my work has huge value. Bill Shultheis was excited beyond belief when he discovered all the amazing stuff at my web site. Michael Kitces engaged in long e-mail correspondence with me, saying that he learned a great deal from our interactions. And thousands of my fellow community members put their lives on the line by standing up to you Goons by asking that honest posting be permitted at our boards. My insights are not “utterly worthless.”

What is “utterly worthless” are your death threats and your demands for unjustified board bannings and your thousands of acts of defamation and your threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs. Wade spent years learning what he has learned. He shouldn’t have to live in fear of what a gang of internet Goons will do to him if he posts honestly re his views on investing at internet discussion boards. Financial fraud is a felony. You Goons should be placed in prison cells so that people like Wade can feel free to express their true beliefs. Then we all move forward together. That’s the answer.

And you don’t for two seconds believe that Shiller is “the real deal.” If you did, you would be encouraging discussion at every site as to the implications of Shiller’s “revolutionary” (his word) research findings. I have asked you scores of times to identify even one big change that Bogle made to the Buy-and-Hold strategy in response to what he learned from Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research. You have not been able to do so. That’s because there isn’t one. The core principle behind the Buy-and-Hold strategy (that the market is efficient) was discredited by Shiller’s 1981 research findings and Bogle has failed to address that reality publicly for 37 years now.

I think the next crash will change how we all deal with these matters. But I could be wrong. We are just going to have to show a little patience to find out for sure.

I naturally wish you the best of luck in all your future life endeavors, old friend.

Rob