A Rich Life

The Old Ideas on Saving & Investing Don't Work -- Here's What Does

“You Try to Dominate All Conversations. Your Posts Make Up 80 Percent of the Content. You Rarely Consider Other Comments…The Volume of Your Posts Was Huge, Like Always, and in the Course of 24 Hours, You Turned a Mild Supporter Into a Detractor.”

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

Rob, just do a quick search of your past interactions. In almost every thread, you try and dominate all conversations. Your posts make up 80% of the content. You rarely consider others comments unless it furthers your position or if you can use it to distort a conversation. I was reading through some old FMF posts the other night and noticed a thread that you jumped in on. Most FMF threads get 20 or less comments. In this one, it quickly passed 100 and FMF shut it down. You seemed to be demanding a guest post and then the debate started. The volume of your posts were huge, like always, and in the course of 24 hours, you turned a mild supporter (Apex) into a detractor.

Do want to change perceptions? If so I suggest you do the following:

Make massive apologies (starting with Wade);

Establish credibility (it is earned, not given away);

Listen 90% of the time, and comment less than 10% of the time- note the percentage of conversation on other blogs;

Be humble;

Don’t insult your audience.

I’m not going to be making any apologies, Pink.

There’s one exception. I am willing to apologize for waiting too long to put forward the post that I put forward on the morning of May 13, 2002. That was wrong.

Outside of that, apologizing is the worst possible thing I could do.

It’s not a problem that Buy-and-Holders and Valuation-Informed Indexers do not agree. That’s a good thing. That’s healthy. For so long as we disagree, the Buy-and-Holders can keep the Valuation-Informed Indexers honest and the Valuation-Informed Indexers can keep the Buy-and-Holders honest. We all benefit from being exposed to the other point of view on a regular basis.

The problem we have is that the Buy-and-Holders got used to being dominant during the insane bull years. They made so much money in so little time that they began thinking that they knew it all. They became arrogant, and, worse, got away with it. They became accustomed to shouting down other points of view. Yuck!

The Buy-and-Holders are responsible for their own bad behavior, Pink. But you know what? The Valuation-Informed Indexers played a role in causing the messed-up situation we have today too.

The Valuation-Informed Indexers failed to speak up when they should have spoken up. Buy-and-Holders advanced death threats and most of the Valuation-Informed Indexers (but not me!) tolerated it. That was wrong. And it didn’t just hurt the Valuation-Informed Indexers. It hurt the Buy-and-Holders too. It led them to believe that behavior that is 100 percent intolerable might be tolerated.

No!

That’s the thing that we all very much want to change deep in our hearts.

I’ll apologize if I get something wrong. That’s a very, very different story.

But I am not going to apologize because I discovered the errors in the Old School safe withdrawal rate studies. That discovery helped everybody. In some part of their consciousness, the Buy-and-Holders want to get the numbers right. My post helped them do that. So no apologies for the exceedingly helpful and brave post of May 13, 2002.

Rob

 

“If You Had Been Banned on One or Two Boards, One Could Say That Maybe There Was the Possibility That Someone Overreacted in Banning You. However, When You See That It Is Consistent Behavior from You Followed by the Consistent Reaction of Those That Read the Boards and Administer the Boards, It Is Clear that the Problem Is You.”

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

Rob,

From what I have read and have also seen in MANY examples, you were banned due to your continued abrasive attitude as well as your refusal to answer direct questions as well as provide proof to back up your claims (such as threats). If you had been banned on one of two boards, one could say that maybe there was the possibility that someone overreacted in banning you. However, when you see that it is consistent behavior from you followed by the consistent reaction of those that read the boards and administer the boards, it is clear to see that the problem is you.

I gave you an example of a similar issue the other day. As I mentioned, I was looking at old postings on the FMF board. I am sure you will agree that this particular board is mostly devoid of confrontation and friction. However, we saw what happened when the comments section (heavily dominated by you) surpassed 100 comments in very quick order and FMF had to shut down the comments. This is not an exception. It seems to be a pattern for you.

You seem to have a campaign every time you post and try to drive over people like a Mack Truck.

I am grateful to you for asking a real and important question here, Pink. You are giving voice in this particular comment to a feeling that is shared by many smart and good people.

To understand what is going on, you must understand the context in which these discussions have been taking place.

Buy-and-Hold was the first effort at a research-based strategy for ordinary people. People LOVE the idea of rooting their investing strategies in peer-reviewed academic research. Buy-and-Hold provided millions of people with AMAZING results for DECADES. People LOVE Buy-and-Hold. They view the Buy-and-Hold pioneers as HEROES.

I say that Buy-and-Hold is dangerous. I say that it is irresponsible. I say that it is a Get Rich Quick scheme. I say that it caused the economic crisis. That’s strong stuff. That strikes the many good and smart people who view Buy-and-Hold in a very positive light as SHOCKING.

People have never heard anyone say the things I am saying before. My words come as a shock. That’s why my posts generate so many questions and comments. It’s not anything I do that causes this. It is the nature of the discussion that causes this. I am questioning fundamental beliefs. That is unsettling on a deep level. People respond in all kinds of unusual ways when their fundamental beliefs are questioned.

The Buy-and-Hold Mafia has handled this by shutting down debate at every board and blog. THAT IS A TERRIBLE MISTAKE.

We need to do just the opposite. We need to ENCOURAGE debate. We need to have a NATIONAL debate. We need these discussions to go viral. We need to get tens of thousands of people, experts and ordinary investors both, involved.

Why?

Because that is how we Normalize the discussions.

We are never all going to agree. It wouldn’t be healthy if we did.

But you are right that we cannot have 200 questions directed to Rob each time he says “hello, how about them Orioles?” We need people to come to accept that there is more than one legitimate viewpoint on all these questions. To do that, we must educate people as to the basics. We do that through discussion. Rather than shutting down discussions, we need to encourage discussions.

Once we do that, the phenomenon that you refer to will fade away in a natural way. You won’t have to force it to happen. It will happen because people will come to know the answers to their many questions. Whether they change their minds about what works in investing or not, they will settle down. Valuation-Informed Indexing will over time become one more thing to take into consideration when deciding on an investing strategy.

I have put forward the new ideas. I don’t apologize for that. The new ideas are very much worthy of the consideration of every investor alive.

I have not caused the circus atmosphere. We have seen a circus atmosphere because debate on these questions has been held back for so long that, when people have an opportunity to ask some questions, their enthusiasm flows over the top of the cup.

Yes, we need to settle things down a good bit.

But not by further suppression.

We need to settle things down by handling discussions of investing strategy in the same way that we handle discussions of every other subject under the sun. We need to accept that there is more than One Right Way to Invest and show respect and affection and gratitude to those who hold viewpoints other than our own that they seek to share with us on discussion boards and blogs.

Rob

Rob Sympathizes (Kinda, Sorta) with Mel
re the Morningstar Ratings Boxes

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A poster named “Yabbadabbado” argues that Mel Lindauer (co-author of “The Bogleheads Guide to Investing”) is overly sensitive. The comment comes in response to a complaint by Mel about the Morningstar ratings boxes, which permit posters to give posts they like a thumbs up and posts they do not like a thumbs down. Mel has been getting a good number of thumbs downs at the Diehards board of late because of his long history of abusive posting there.

I see merit in what both Yabba and Mel have to say re this one.

Yabba is right that Mel and lots of the others who post on discussion boards are overly sensitive. It’s a good thing that they didn’t have those rating-box thingamabobbles in place when I was posting over there. I would have been piling up negative 40s! I would have been attracting so many thumbs-down ratings that I probably would have caused the Morningstar discussion-board software to crash! I would have had people urging that a policy be adopted that a bomb be dropped on the home of the community member with the most thumbs-down ratings! And the proposal would have brought crowds to the little yellow house across the street from the post office to hear the imminent “Ka-Boom!”!

Mel — I feel for you, man. I very, very much know how it feels.

But you gotta let it go. Sometimes you’re up, sometimes you’re down. If you’re wanting to hear the applause, you’ve got to be willing to hear the boobirds too. It’s all part of the wonderful game.

I agree with Yabba that people take this stuff too personally. That causes a lot of trouble. Mel needs to chill out. Lots of others need to chill out with him.

That said, Mel has a point as well.

Mel has a lot of accomplishments to his credit in that board community. The Vanguard Diehards board was once the most successful investing board in the history of the internet. That was to a considerable extent Mel’s doing. He had put forward tens of thousands of helpful posts. Is he not entitled to some respect from his fellow community members in return for that? Should he have to listen to jeering?

Yes and no.

Mel is not being jeered because of the tens of thousands of helpful posts. He is being jeered because of the many hundreds of abusive ones. It’s taboo to say that. But he knows it, Yabba knows it, and every poster who has been paying even a tiny bit of attention knows it. To get back in the good graces of that community, Mel would need to do the things that humans do to get back in the good graces of communities they have harmed. But that would mean admitting the harm that has taken place. That cannot be done. That must not be done. Right?

I don’t think that’s right.

There’s a reason why it has become the cultural norm among all civilized peoples for those who discover they got an important number wrong in a study to correct it (Mel did not himself publish a study that got an important number wrong, but he cites without criticism the Greaney study in his book and has not done anything about the misimpressions he created by doing so since learning of the analytical errors in the study). There’s a reason why it has become a cultural norm among all civilized peoples for those who act rudely and abusively and do harm by doing so to apologize for the harm they have done. If the internet discussion board is going to achieve its potential (I very much hope that it does), the people who run the boards are going to have to start to take seriously their responsibilities for seeing that cultural norms are given the respect they merit.

Morningstar has rules prohibiting the tactics that Mel used to destroy the Diehards board. Had those rules been enforced in even a halfway reasonable manner, Mel would not be in the fix that he is in today. Had those rules been enforced in even a halfway reasonable manner, he would have been given a warning when he first began posting abusively. My guess is that he would have altered his behavior in response to the warning. He would have reined himself in. That board community would still be thriving today. Mel would still be loved there.

It’s Morningstar’s fault that it did not happen that way. Morningstar wrote its rules in the way it did to attract people of intelligence and integrity to its boards. Then it abandoned them by failing to administer its own rules in a reasonable manner. It did a whole big bunch of people a whole big bunch of harm by failing to do so. Morningstar should be ashamed of its behavior re this matter. That’s my take.

I can’t tell you precisely why Morningstar didn’t enforce the rules. It appears that part of it is that they thought that they might lose some posters if they did so and they didn’t want to lose those people. That’s wrong. That doesn’t work.

By failing to rein Mel in, Morningstar put him in an untenable position. He felt forced to become increasingly abusive to stomp out the efforts of the hundreds of community members who were interested in engaging in honest discussions of safe withdrawal rates and other valuation-related topics. Now there are hundreds and hundreds of abusive Mel posts in the files. Not good. Not good for Mel. Not good for Morningstar either (the abusive posting destroyed the board, so Morningstar ended up losing not the small number of posters who would have fled had they enforced the rules but pretty much the entire board community).

When a site owner publishes rules to govern posting at its site, it is making a promise to us to enforce those rules in a reasonable manner. We should hold the site owners to those promises. To fail to do so creates problems for everyone — for us, for the site owners, and for the abusive posters too. No one benefits from a failure to enforce the rules that prohibit abusive posting.

I admire a lot of what Mel has done. I of course do not admire his abusive posting one little bit. He’s a grown-up and he needs to take responsibility for what he has done. But Mel’s abusive posting is not solely Mel’s doing. Morningstar permitted it to happen; by failing to act, an argument can even be made that Morningstar encouraged it. We encouraged it too when we failed to speak up in clear and direct and firm terms. The Normals played a role in the destruction of that board too.

Mel blames his troubles on the ratings boxes. That’s not it. I’ve seen ratings features used well and I’ve seen them used poorly. In the days when the Motley Fool board was being built up, community members there used the recommendations feature responsibly; we used it to point other community members to the best stuff on the board. In the days when the Motley Fool board was in decline, community members used the recommendations feature to advance savage smear campaigns.

It’s not ratings features that make a board succeed or fail. It’s people. Attract people who love community and the community will grow. Attract people who hate community and the community will fail. Mel loved the Diehards community until the community expressed a strong desire to engage in honest posting re safe withdrawal rates and then he decided he hated it instead. That was his failing. Morningstar’s failing was not doing anything to rein him in until too many good people had left in revulsion and too many bad people had been drawn in by the out-of-control ugliness.

The Vanguard Diehards board was an amazing resource for middle-class investors for a long time. People insult it when they suggest that the adoption of ratings boxes is what did it in. The board was done in by one of the ugliest and most sustained rampages of abusive posting ever seen in the history of the internet. If we deny that, we fail to learn any lessons from the experience.

We need to learn these lessons. We need to stop hurting ourselves in this way. Mel deserves a lot more from us than what we have given him thus far.

And it’s not just Mel who deserves better, of course. Truth be told, we all deserve a lot better from us than what we have given ourselves thus far.

Love is the answer. Mel hates it when I quote from the lyrics of popular songs in discussions of investing. But I really do believe that Jackie DeShannon nailed it when she told us that “What the Vanguard Diehards Need Now Is Love, Sweet Love.” With a little more love, Mel never would have even considered posting abusively. With a little more love, Morningstar would have reined him in had he done so. With a little more love, hundreds of community members would have insisted that Morningstar act had it falled to do so. With a little more love, Mel would have responded to those thumbs-down ratings by acknowledging the problem and getting about the business of setting things right with his fellow community members.

Lord, we don’t need another SWR study.
We’ve got Old School ones and New School ones enough to read.
We’ve got calculators generating all the numbers you could want to show.
Lord, if you really want to know…

Today’s Passion: You can read my reaction to learning that I had been banned from the Vanguard Diehards board (now that’s a thumbs-down rating!) in a blog entry entitled Banned at Morningstar!

“An Important Communications Medium of the Future”

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Katy Marquardt has written about the split-off of the Bogleheads community from the Vanguard Diehards community at her U.S. News and World Report blog.

Juicy Excerpt: Concludes Coleman: “The revamped Diehards.org is better organized, easier to navigate and much more intelligently moderated than the older version,” he says. “It’s becoming a true social networking site.”

I put forward a comment filling in some of the background that Murray Coleman “overlooked” in his write-up at IndexUniverse.com (referred to in Katy’s blog entry)

Juicy Excerpt: The internet discussion board is an important communications medium of the future. We learn things on discussion boards that we cannot learn through books or magazine articles or speeches. The magic is that we get to see how real live people apply the theories they learned about in books and magazine articles and speeches.

Threads are ongoing both at the Bogleheads community and at the Vanguard Diehards community. There’s a thread ongoing at Goon Central too but I recently added as a plug-in to this blog an Extreme Dumbnosity Filter and it will not permit me to post the link; you’ll have to dig that one up on your own.

Oh, shoot! — Here it is.

Today’s Passion: Jim Wiandt, publisher of IndexUniverse.com (referred to in Katy’s blog entry), said of the Valuation-Informed Indexing approach that “It’s not like you are proposing some wild new idea!” That’s me — Good Old Moderate-Sounding Non-Stop Troublemaker Rob.

The Community Toilet Is Overflowing

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I drove my mother to Atlantic City on Saturday. I don’t gamble (except in poker games with friends) So I spent much of the day sitting on a bench on the boardwalk writing articles for the web site.

One of them is entitled “Investor Emotions.” The article attempts to correlate the emotion with the greatest influence on investor psychology at a given time with the P/E10 value that applies at that time. It’s highly tentative stuff. But it’s potentially highly significant stuff too.

Our most important finding of recent years is that investing is primarily an emotional endeavor and only secondarily a rational endeavor. Most investing guides focus on the rational side of the equation. So most investing guides miss the most important part of the story. Our job is to address the issues that have been widely overlooked and that are thus not yet well-understood.

When the job is done right, there are great rewards. I believe that we will be able to help many people win financial freedom many years sooner than would otherwise have been possible.

There’s a certain Yuckiness Factor that goes with the job, however.

There was a time in my life when I was visiting a shrink on a weekly basis. I recall telling him about a dream in which a toilet was overflowing and I was trying to take care of it but the water level just kept rising and eventually there was water and feces flowing all over the floor and there was nothing I could do. He told me that this was the result of my efforts to examine the questions that I was talking over with him. I was making an effort to look at the dark stuff that people ordinarily don’t like to think about but that we all know is there and must be dealt with all the same.

That’s what I think has been going on at our Retire Early boards in recent years. We all know that the stuff being put forward by the Greaney Goons is sewage. We all hate it. In ordinary circumstances, we wouldn’t remain long at a party that Greaney Goons were permitted to crash. We would ask the host to take care of the problem, and, if he failed to do so, we would walk. Most of us view our self-respect as being of greater value than whatever enjoyment we get from attending even the swingingest party.

Most of us view our self-respect as being of greater value than whatever enjoyment we get from participating at even the swingingest discussion-board too. So why the heck do we tolerate the Goons? Why have we permitted them to continue their Campaign of Terror against us for over four years now? Why is it that we fail to take action when it is brought to our attention that the community toilet is overflowing?

It’s because of the emotions that the longest and strongest bull market in the history of the United States has caused us to feel in response to discussions of the realities of stock investing. We all know on some level of consciousness that, when prices get out of hand, they must at some point return to reasonable levels. We don’t enjoy contemplating this reality, however. We certainly don’t like looking at the numbers. We don’t want it shoved in our faces just how bad things have gotten, just how irresponsible we have been in bidding up stock prices to such absurd levels in recent years. We don’t want to think about how many people we have hurt by doing this, and we especially don’t want to think about how much we have hurt ourselves.

We need to think about it, though. Broken toilets must be repaired. Broken stock markets must be repaired too. Not thinking about the problem doesn’t solve it. Not thinking about the problem causes the problem to get worse.

We need to get about the business of fixing the toilet. Actually, there is more than one toilet that we need to fix. We need to fix the community toilet. We also need to fix the Big Bad Outside World’s stock-market toilet (or at least make the necessary change in our stock allocations so that the continued overflowing of that toilet doesn’t do us more harm).

We are looking at some dirty and unpleasant-smelling things. Not because we enjoy looking at dirty and unpleasant-smelling things. We are doing this for a bright and good and healthy reason. We are doing it because we want to win financial freedom early in life and because that requires investing effectively for the long term and because that in turn involves dealing with human emotions, which are the driver of changes in the prices paid for our stocks.

Plumbers get their hands dirty from time to time. That’s a fact. But plumbers do work that very much needs to be done. Plumbers are a good people, a kind people, a generous people.

We are a community of plumbers.

So let’s plumb!

In Defense of Mary Poppins

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This time The Little Stinkers have gone too far.

They are now directing their Smear Campaigns against Mary Poppins!

Here is a sampling of community comments put forward during recent discussions of The Poppins Matter:

JohnYaker: As far as John Greaney’s article referenced in the original post, I found it cruelly mean-spirited.

Gregory: You’re right, the article about Rob is very mean-spirited. It’s too bad the author feels the need to do this sort of thing.

OUJohnNasr: That link is mean-spirited, hateful, degrading, but above all, it’s true. Rob, if you are reading this, please do the right thing and get back in the work force. Leaving a $100,000+ a year job at the age of 43 was financial suicide considering the size of your nest egg.

Radioman: When, how and if to retire are determined solely by individual circumstances.

JohnYaker: The article says more about the character of the author than the subject. Reminds me of schoolyard bullying.

Earnabuck: I think Greaney is still steaming because Rob exposed him and his 4% SWR. He gave bad advice and attempts to change the spotlight off of his own recklessness. What a shame, quite petty.

Allan: I think Greaney’s website is full of excellent, specific information, while Rob’s website is like watching Mary Poppins.

CashNCarry: Why on earth would someone advertise their personal life the way he has, I mean he’s created his own personal Truman Show. It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.

Clemcs06: Dude, get a freakin job so you can take your kids to Disney World.

Hocus: Many sites in the personal finance area are far too stuffy. Mary Poppins is the voice of common sense in comparison to some of the oh-so-grave-and-oh-so-self-important voices being heard on Planet Internet today.

Jason375: I am not sure Rob intends for his “advice” to be taken seriously. He likes to challenge the conventional wisdom (lots of posts with titles like “work is not a four letter word”) and get reactions.

Tc101: It takes all kinds. Maybe hocus adds some flavor to the mix.

Allan: The problem I have is that Rob is putting himself out to the general public as a financial expert, questioning the real experts like Bernstein and Scott Burns.

Greg24: I wouldn’t call it retirement to quit your job so you can post 12 hrs a day on the internet. [Editors Note: Ouch!]

Jason375: Greaney is single and managed to accumulate several million dollars for a secure retirement. Rob has millions less and dependents. I guess everyone is free to choose their own experts, lol.

CashNcarry: I hate to admit it, but hocus brings out the worst in me (and some others as well). He reminds me of one of those lifesize inflatable clown balloons I had as a child. You’d step on it’s feet, and whack the tar out of it, and it would go down and spring back up again ready for the next whack.

Arrete: I will not respond to any post directed at me by Rob because I already know he will either play the injured innocent, pretend we’re friends, or twist my words.

Hocus: My friendships are not dependent on what the individual who I have come to think of as a friend believes about safe withdrawal rates or any other investing topic.

When I Didn’t Post Honestly

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I have never engaged in deliberate deception in my writings. There was a time, though, when I was afraid to be fully honest about what I knew about stocks.

I founded the Financial Freedom Community in December 1999 with a series of posts about the Passion Saving concept that for a time made the Retire Early discussion board at the Motley Fool site the most exciting board on the face of Planet Internet. John Greaney was the founder of that board, and I knew from the first time that I looked at his web site that the methodology he used to calculate the safe withdrawal rate (SWR) was analytically invalid. I had done my own study of SWRs in the mid-90s in preparation for my own early retirement, and I had learned from reading John Bogle’s work that changes in valuations always affect long-term stock returns (and, thus, SWRs).

Early on in my posting career at Motley Fool, I tried to warn my fellow community members of the danger of going with too high a stock allocation when valuations are at extremely high levels. I held back, though, from posting the full truth about SWRs. One reason was that I did not want to suffer the “punishments” that Greaney made clear would be imposed on any community member who asked hard questions about the numbers in his study. Another was that we were just getting the Retire Early movement off the ground, and the last thing we needed was the sort of flame war that posters like Greaney use to block questioning of their claims.

I never told untruths. But I didn’t tell complete truths either. I held back.

Was it all Greaney’s fault? It was not. Greaney took advantage of a situation. But the reality is that Greaney could never have hoped to have had any success banning honest posting unless a good number of other community members were willing either to post in support of his attacks on honest posters or at a minimum to tolerate his attacks on honest posters. The ban on honest SWR posting that applies at that board to this day was a community effort.

Why the heck did our community go along with a ban on honest SWR posting? Don’t aspiring early retirees need accurate information on what the historical data says re SWRs?

Of course we do. And of course we know that we do.

The problem is that we sense that permitting honest posting on SWRs opens a Pandora’s box. Permit honest posting on SWRs, and the obvious next step is to permit honest posting on the question of how valuations affect long-term stock returns in general. Permit honest posting on the question of how valuations affect long-term returns in general, and the obvious next step is —

— the end of the Bull Market.

I’m not kidding.

Bull Markets are times when stocks become wildly overpriced. It is not rational to invest heavily in stocks when they are wildly overpriced. Bull Markets are irrational. All Bull Markets are fueled by some sort of deception or another. Without at least a good bit of self-deception, how could middle-class investors be persuaded to invest in ways contrary to their own self-interest?

The Great SWR Debate was never just a debate about a number. It was always also a debate about the nature of stocks as an asset class and about how to invest successfully for the long run. If Greaney had been found to have been right about SWRs, it would have meant that stocks had become a different sort of asset class than what they have been throughout the last 135 years of U.S. stock-market history. If Greaney had been found to have been right about SWRs, it would have meant that the Stocks-for-the-Long-Run Investing Paradigm had been a paradigm built on solid ground.

It’s not just the conventional methodology SWR studies that have been discredited as the result of our discussions. The dominant investing paradigm of the past 25 years has been discredited too.

That’s why it is so hard for so many to tell the complete and plain truth about SWRs. Telling the truth about SWRs sends you over a cliff. You land in a new and better world than the world you were in before you fell. Still, the fall is a long and scary one.

I knew back on May 13, 2002 (the day that I put forward “The Post Heard Around the World,” the one that kicked off The Great SWR Debate), that SWRs mattered. I didn’t know at the time how much.

The NoFeeBoards.com Dream Is Over

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It was a post of mine applauding “Raddr” for his outstanding safe-withdrawal-rate research that led to formation of the FIRE board at the NoFeeBoards.com site. Among financial contributors to the site, I rank second for the size of my lifetime contribution. I was the founder of the most successful board in the site’s history, the Safe Withdrawal Rate Research Group board.

So it pained me a bit to hear Sunday morning that ES, the site owner, is shutting down the shop.

The other side of the story is that the site lost its way a long time ago. ES had the world by the tail for a while there. He tapped into the powerful desire that many feel to learn more about how to win financial freedom early in life and he came within a whisker of seeing his site meet with a level of success that he couldn’t possibly have dreamed of when he first got into the site-building business. But ES made terrible and incomprehensible and unforgivable mistakes in his leadership decisions, and the site has been a site waiting to die for at least one year now and arguably for a good bit longer than that.

The Glory Days of the NoFeeBoards.com site were from December 2002 through July 2003. ES was the anti-Greaney in those days, and a large segment of our community fell in love with him for offering an alternative to the hate posting that comes to dominate all boards that extend posting privileges to Greaney defenders.

“Wanderer,” expelled from the Motley Fool board for the thought-crime of believing that there might be some circumstances in which investing in real estate makes sense, said that ES offered a friendly port in the midst of a vicious storm. He wasn’t the only one who felt that way about the guy once upon a time. All of our best posters of the day found their way to the FIRE board–Wanderer, Raddr, BenSolar, PeteyPerson, FoolMeOnce, John Walter Russell, and on and on.

Greaney regularly smeared ES and his site for offering those of us seeking the civil and reasoned discussions of early retirement that put our movement on the map back in the Glory Days of the Motley Fool board. But it didn’t matter. People loved the new kid on the block because the new kid was giving them what they wanted in a Retire Early board. So the new kid grew stronger and stronger and stronger day by day by day.

Until the heat grew too strong for ES to take it anymore. Then we saw the pattern we had earlier seen play out at the Motley Fool board play out at its successor. First, Greaney posters were given the same posting rights as those interested in discussing early retirement (in violation of the site’s posting rules, which prohibit the tactics that have been employed by Greaney defenders to drive effective on-topic posters off of all our boards). Then, the weak response to the threat raised by the Greaney defenders encouraged them to become even more abusive, and caused all of the wonderful posters who built the place either to take their leave of it or to be frightened into silence on the Greaney matter and on other topics on which Greaney indicated that he did not want to see honest posting (some even joined in on the abusive posting as a way of gaining “permission” from the Goons to continue posting). Finally, the Goons demanded that all honest, on-topic posters be removed.

From there, the death spiral just continued until things reached a point where the board often went days without generating a single on-topic post of any significance. The FIRE board was no longer an alternative to the Motley Fool board. It was a less-trafficked copycat of the Motley Fool board (ES does not have access to the Motley Fool eyeball generation engine that Greaney has used to replace lost on-topic posters with posters interested in having discussions of politics).

It was ES’s weak leadership that did the board in. The most important qualification for the job of site administrator is the courage to stand up to goon posters. If you ain’t got that one, you ain’t got a chance. ES never had a chance.

That said, I do not believe that the blame for the failure of the site can be laid entirely at his feet.

There were posts at the board yesterday by “Ben” and “Mike” expressing gratitude to ES for the things they learned by reading the board and by participating in discussions held there. Ben and Mike were two of the best posters at the SWR board, and I am of course extremely grateful for the many fine contributions they put forward there. Still, I think it is fair to say that both of them (and lots of others too) let ES down in a big way. We all would be better off with fewer expressions of thanks to site owners at times when their boards have already been destroyed and more expressions of support at times when they are showing fear of what will happen to them if they take effective action against the The Little Stinkers (a term we sometimes use in our discussions to refer to Greaney defenders).

They were numerous occasions when ES indicated that he needed some support from fellow community members to develop the courage to stand up to the stinkers. Yes, it’s his job. No, it shouldn’t be up to the posters at a board to do the site owner’s job for him. Still, the reality is that the internet discussion board is a personal communications medium. If we want to think of ourselves as a true community, we need to act like one. In true communities, people like Ben and Mike (and lots of others) develop the courage that people like ES lack and step forward to help them out a bit in their time of need.

Ben let us down. Mike let us down. Lots of people let us down.

I’m not saying that ES didn’t let us down big-time too. Far from it. But I believe that the guy really was pursuing a dream for a time there, and I know that it must hurt for him to know that he was close enough to seeing that little dream come true to taste it. I know what it’s like to pursue a vision and then to watch it begin to come to life in the real world. So I can’t help feeling bad to know what ES is going through today.

It didn’t have to end up this way. We all should be ashamed of ourselves. This is a case in which our community dropped the ball big time.

The Little Stinkers are still among us. ES and all the wonderful posters who provided us the powerful insights put forward at the FIRE board during its Glory Days are either gone or silenced. Some days you get the bear and some days the bear gets you.

The NoFeeBoards.com dream is over. Not just for ES. For all of us.

That’s why we call them The Little Stinkers. The end product of the projects to which they direct their time and energies send out a powerfully foul and offensive odor. Yucko!

We Ban What We Fear

by

There have been several occasions on which the Greaney Goons have invaded this site and tried to bring the discussions held here into the sewer to which they have pulled discussions held at a number of our Retire Early discussions boards. My reaction? I deleted the posts. In several instances, I banned the posters involved from further participation here.

David Forrest has banned honest posting on safe withdrawal rates at the Motley Fool site. Bill Sholar has banned honest posting on safe withdrawal rates at the Early Retirement Forum. ES has banned honest posting on safe withdrawal rates at the NoFeeBoards.com site. There’s a sense in which you could say that Forrest, Sholar and ES are on one side of a battle, and that I am on the other (I often argue that honest posting should be permitted at our boards). There’s another sense, though, in which you could say that the four of us are all doing much the same thing.

Why is it that I banned abusive posting at this site? I fear it. I’ve seen the damage that abusive posting has done to a number of Retire Early boards, and I don’t want to see it do that sort of damage to this place. So I took action against it. I banned what I feared.

Why is it that Forrest, Sholar and ES banned honest posting on safe withdrawal rates at their sites? They fear it. They’ve seen the damage that abusive posting has done to their sites, and they are not able to bring themselves to exercise their responsibilities reasonably by banning the posters who engaged in the abusive posting. They saw that it was honest posting on safe withdrawal rates that was upsetting the abusive posters. So they came to fear honest posting and took action against it. They banned what they feared.

I’m different from Forrest, Sholar and ES in that I believe that our community is strong enough and smart enough and good enough to overcome the hell it has been put through by the Goons. Forrest, Sholar and ES patronize us by concluding that we are just not a mature enough people to accept that action needs to be taken against community members who we once respected but who turned against us in pursuit of their personal agendas. The differences between us are real.
That said, the core motivations for our actions are similar. The core motivation for both sorts of responses to the abusive posting problem is fear. We ban what we fear.

How is it that several people who we think of as leaders in our community have come to fear honest posting on the safe withdrawal rate question? It didn’t happen because most community members came to think of the question of what the historical stock-return data says about the effect of valuations on long-term stock returns as a trivial matter. It happened because most community members came to think of the question of what the historical stock-return data says about the effect of valuations on long-term stock returns as a significant matter indeed.

It’s not just common sense that tells us that valuations matter. It’s not just the testimony of a good number of the best-informed investing experts in the world that tells us that valuations matter. It’s not just a reasoned examination of the historical data that tells us that valuations matter. The bans on honest posting tell us this too. The behavior of our fellow community members when the topic is brought to the table tells us this. The failure of nerve of our leaders tell us this.

People reveal themselves through their participation on discussion boards. Not always in the ways they intend. They reveal themselves by showing us what upsets them. They reveal themselves by showing us what sorts of tactics they are willing to employ to make their case. They reveal themselves by showing us what sorts of tactics they are willing to tolerate from others and how the personal discomfort they experience during discussions of particular topics causes them to change their usual views on abusive posting when discussions of those particular topics are commanding the attention of their fellow community members.

We ban what we fear. I fear abusive posting. But I sure don’t fear honest reports of what the historical data says about the effect of valuations on long-term stock returns. How about you?