“What Matters to Me Is the Journalism Question — Permitting People to Have the Discussions They Want to Have — and the Human Psychology Question — the Incredible Ability We Humans Possess to Engage in Self-Deception, Even When It Does Us Great Financial Harm.”

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

“ The reaction we have seen from people who have been exposed to my thinking says a lot.”

Yep. It is dead silence. No one is interested. Even your ex-wife didn’t agree with your thinking. That is why she is your ex.

If the reaction had been dead silence, you Goons would never have advanced a single abusive post. It was the strong positive reaction to hearing about the last 42 years of peer-reviewed research that you saw as a threat to the belief that most people have in Buy-and-Hold.

My ex was fine with the investing stuff. I don’t think that she had a strong opinion one way or the other. She did not like it that there was not money coming in for so long a time, that’s all. And it wasn’t that she was money hungry. I think that she viewed it as a moral failing. She has a strong work ethic (as do I). The language that she would use in our arguments was “you don’t work.” I of course have a very different perspective. I believe that the work that I am doing in trying to get every internet site opened to honest posting re the research is the most important work being done in the United States today. But that was her complaint. She thought that I was probably on to something re the investing ideas. But she didn’t care enough about the subject to study it in detail and to find out for sure. It’s not her thing.

It’s not really my thing either. I got pulled into it by circumstances. My attachment to the subject is through my interest in understanding human psychology. It’s an amazing puzzle to me that people have 42 years of research available to them that would permit them to invest with much less risk and to retire many years earlier and they won’t give themselves permission to talk about it because that would require them to acknowledge that there once was a time when they didn’t know everything there is to know about this important subject. That blows my mind. The potential for enhancing millions of human lives just by permitting a discussion is off the charts. So I feel compelled to do what I can to see that that happens as soon as possible. The investing stuff is seconary or even tertiary for me. What mattets to me is the journalism question — permitting people to have the discussions they want to have — and the human psychology question — the incredible ability we humans possess to engage in self deception, even when it does us great financial harm.

Rob