“The Fact That You and a Good Number of Others Find My Work so Distressing Suggests that My Work Is of Great Importance.”

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

People can advance death threats for all sorts of reasons other than ‘Rob Bennett is doing important work’. They could just find you extremely unpleasant and/or annoying.

Why would the statement “I believe that the last 38 years of peer-reviewed research is legitimate research” be sufficiently annoying as to provoke a death threat unless there were some concern that that research is important? The death threat arises in response to the pain experienced when a reality that you want to suppress is given clear and persistent expression.

I understand that I make you feel pain. I am saying that the fact that my words make you feel pain is significant. The pain evidences itself because there is a part of your brain that wonders whether the stock market might work like every other market that exists — price might matter big time, exercising price discipline might be essential. To go on about your daily business without making any change in your investment strategy, you need to silence discussions causing you to doubt your strategy of price indifference. If you had complete confidence in that strategy, the possibility of advancing a death threat would never even occur to you. If you were as sure about Buy-and-Hold as you pretend to be, you would not find my words so annoying. You would ignore them.

The fact that you and a good number of others find my work so distressing suggests that my work is of great importance. You don’t respond to all words with which you have some disagreement with death threats. What is it about my words that make them so annoying to you that you respond with death threats? Why does Valuation-Informed Indexing bother you so much? Why can’t you walk away from a statement that ” the safe withdrawal rate is a number that varies, depending on the valuation level that applies on the day that the retirement begins” without feeling a need to respond in some way? Why does my stuff bother you so darn much?

Rob