“If You Had Never Come to Stake Your Life on Those Wrong Understandings, You Would Be Perfectly Happy to Learn About the Research-Backed Understandings Today. You Became Dogmatic Before All the Research Had Been Published.”

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

All hail “Rob the dictator”.

To say “we should be open to hearing what the peer-reviewed research says” is not to be a dictator. I was once a Buy-and-Holder. The thing that drew me to the strategy is that it was promoted as being a research-based strategy. Research is a quest for truth. Yes, following research can sometimes mean having to say the words “I” and “Was” and “Wrong” because new research can teach us new things. But it is not a dictator demanding that you follow the new path. It is your own desire to live in the truth that pulls you in the new direction. There is a part of the Buy-and-Hold minset that craves truth. If that were not so, the Buy-and-Hold concept would never have been promoted as reseaech-based.

Deep down we want the same things, Anonymous. You won’t acknowledge it but it is so. You just don’t like the scary part of acknowledging that there was a time when as a people we did not know everything there is to know about stock investing, so we got some important thing wrong. But, if you had never come to stake your life on those wrong understandings, you would be perfectly happy to learn about the research-backed understandings today. You became dogmatic before all the research had been published. That’s the story here. The new research was not put out to make you feel bad. It was put out to help you to come to a better understanding of an important subject.

Rob