“It Is Only a Civil and Reasoned Debate That Could Persuade Me That I Am Wrong.”

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

“I don’t think that I suffer from a delusion.”

But you do. You have been told this time and again by many people. You choose to not believe it. You then convince yourself otherwise by interpreting things only in a way that fits with your desires. You don’t have the analytical capability and discernment to really judge if you are right or don’t. You only want to believe you are right and then you immediately reflect anything that doesn’t fit a story you want to have cast.

You’re describing cognitive dissonance, Anonymous. I am saying that you suffer from cognitive dissonance and you are saying that I do. It’s a standoff.

The back-and-forth reminds me of the comment that was made by one of the members of a peer-review committee that rejected the research paper that I co-authored with Wade Pfau (and which I view as the most important peer-reviewed research published in this field in 30 years). He said: “The elephant-in-the-room question is — What is the ultimate criterion for one to conclude with confidence that one strategy is better than the other?”

Standing by itself, the comment is of course fine. There is a world of difference between Buy-and-Hold and Valuation-Informed Indexing and the issues at stake are of the utmost importance — the retirements of millions of people are riding on the answer to these questions. So naturally it is so that we all would like to identify the ultimate criterion for concluding with confidence that one strategy is better than the other. I heartily endorse that man’s words.

Except in the context in which they were advanced. The words were offered to explain a rejection of a research paper that would go a great distance toward helping us all to figure out which strategy is superior if only it were featured on the front page of the New York Times. If we do not as a society know for certain which strategy is superior — and 100 percent of the evidence that has accumulated over the past 17 years shows that as a society we do not know for certain which strategy is superior– then we should make it public policy concern #1 to get to the bottom of that one. That means working it and working it and working it, talking it over and talking it over and talking it over, exploring in depth issue after issue after issue after issue.

You say: “You don’t have the analytical capability and discernment to really judge if you are right.” I don’t think that’s so. But there is a problem with me assessing for myself whether it is so or not. If it were so, I would not be able to perform a proper assessment no matter how I tried. So I need to run my ideas past others to over time gain the ability to make a clear and firm and balanced and confident assessment. But that is of course the very thing that I cannot do for so long as the Ban on Honest Posting remains in effect. So I oppose the ban.

I have seen amazing lows and amazing high. The Goon stuff is the lowest of the lows that I have ever seen on the internet. The Goon stuff goes so low that I often hesitate to mention it in my writings because the Normals whom I need to persuade to prevail in these debates have never in their lifetimes encountered anything so low and so my accurate reports of things that you Goons have done cause them to doubt me rather than to doubt the investment strategy for which these low tactics are put to use.

The highs are just as high as the lows are low. Say that I am right on only one point — that the retirement study posted at John Greaney’s site lacks an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins. If I got everything else that I have said over the past 17 years wrong and I got that one right, I have made the biggest contribution to this field that anyone has made over the past 17 years. In the event that the Greaney study truly lacks a valuation adjustment (and it does), Greaney didn’t just destroy the lives of the thousands of people at the Motley Fool site who used his study to plan their retirements. He destroyed the lives of MILLIONS through his insanely abusive posting tactics.

We had thousands of people at that site who would have helped us to get the word out about the errors in the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies to every investor alive on the planet today. Greaney isn’t the only one who made that mistake. EVERY Buy-and-Hold retirement study makes that mistake. And 95 percent of all articles that have been published in recent decades telling people how to plan their retirements are rooted in the findings of those Buy-and-Hold retirement studies. Our failure to get those studies corrected for 17 years now is the biggest economic and political issue before us as a people today. The survival of our economic system is at stake. It is possible that even the survival of our political system is at stake.

Or so Rob Bennett truly believes, you know?

I could be wrong. I am one of those darned humans, like Greaney and Bogle and Lindauer, and we are known as a species to make terrible mistakes from time to time. But I cannot in good conscience take the word of internet Goons that I am wrong as gospel. Those millions of people need to have someone stand up for them and insist that every discussion board and blog on the internet be opened to honest posting re these matters. I have been elected for the job. So I am going to give it my best shot. I couldn’t live with myself if I did any less.

If the entire internet is opened to honest posting and the result of a civil and reasoned debate in which people from “both sides” participate without any fear of being punished in any way for stating their sincere views re these matters shows that I am wrong about these matters, I pray that I will have the grace to say so in a clear and simple and direct way. But it is only a civil and reasoned debate that could persuade me that I am wrong. I don’t give much credence to death threats or demands for unjustified board bannings or thousands of acts of defamation or threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs. I could not live with myself if I let acts of intimidation persuade me to sell out my country. No this boy. That’s not what I am about and it’s not a close call.

So we will have to wait a bit and see how it all plays out. If Shiller is right in what he says in his Nobel-prize-winning research (I believe that he is), then we are going to see another price crash in the next year or two or three. If the CAPE level tells us the amount of emotion present in investors at a given point in time, then a lower CAPE will be signifying less emotional investors. That is, investors more open to engaging in civil and reasoned discussion of the last 37 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. I think that’s where things are headed. We will see. I will always say everything that I can to put you Goons and our Wall Street Con Men friends in the best possible light without crossing the felony line myself. But I will never say that Greaney’s study contains a valuation adjustment. There are limits. Prison life is not for me.

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

Cognitive Dissonance Sufferer (Not! — I Think!) Rob