“This Entire Debate Is a Debate Between Research/Reason and Intimidation/Emotion.”

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

Is there anyone that knows you on a personal level that would also agree with you being rational and your wife being irrational?

I didn’t say that she was irrational. I said that from her perspective what she did was rational. If we were all thinking clearly, we all would want any errors made in retirement studies to be corrected as soon as possible. If we all were thinking clearly, there never would have been a single abusive post, much less any of the criminal stuff. There is no way without her following this stuff closely that she could have imagined that 90 percent of the stuff that went down went down. We have seen some crazy, crazy, crazy stuff.

I said that she was irrational only from my perspective. I had had a front-row seat to everything that has gone down. Please remember that in the days before Greaney launched his Campaingn of Terror aganst the Motley Fool board community, I was a Buy-and-Holder myself. Was I irrational? I don’t think so. I liked it that the strategy was promoted as research-based. I gave up on Buy-and-Hold on the evening ogf August 27, 2002, when Greaney advanced his first dreath threat and it was endrosed by over 200 Buy-and-Holders. That’s enotion, Anonymous. That’s pure emotion. It’s the farthest thing from research that you can get. This entire debate is a debate between research/reason and intimidation/emotion. I today criticized Buy-and-Hold for the same reason that I once endorced it. I endorsed it because I believed that it was supported by reason. When I discovered that it is not, I moved on to something that really is supported by reserarch (Valuation-Informed Indexing).

My ex did not live through what I lived through. If she had, I am confident that she would be 100 percent supportive of evetything thst I have done. I think that the same is true of every site owner who has banned me. I think the same is true of all of the researchers. I even think that that is probably true of you Goons. If we could go back to the afternoon of May 13, 2002, and play it over, I am confident that you Goons would play it differently the second time through. The unfortunate thing is that of course we cannot do that. As the pile of evidence showing that the Greaney study lacks a valuation adjustment gets higher and higher, you Goons become more and more entrenched in hyour position. Now it’s not just an error in a retirement study that embarrasses you, it’s a 20-year cover-up of that mistake.

The only way that we can keep things from continuing to get worse is to open every site to honest posting so that things start getting better. You are not going to hear anyone saying that it is rational to fail to correct errors in retirement studies after that happens. The key is opening every site to honest posting so that we can talk through what is best for every single person involved. That’s the rational thing to do.

I hope that that helps a tiny bit.

Rob