Safe Withdrawal Rate versus P/E10 Data

Research on Safe Withdrawal Rates

Moderator: hocus2004

JWR1945
***** Legend
Posts: 1697
Joined: Tue Nov 26, 2002 3:59 am
Location: Crestview, Florida

Post by JWR1945 »

hocus wrote:The threads are doing that, to be sure. It's not anything that I am doing that is doing that. Do you see any word games in my posts? Do you see any personal attacks?
To hocus:
It is something that you are doing. You respond to baiting. You reply whenever you see a post that is directed specifically at you. That is what you are doing wrong. Sometimes, you need to force yourself to keep quiet.

I will add that nobody understood my Blunt Words post. I had tried not to be harsh. I was not at all concerned about the Motley Fool. I was concerned about baiting on these boards. It appears impossible to use even the mildest forms of subtlety on discussion boards.

I do not consider the comments on this thread to include baiting.

I will add that I have always found that my looking into hocus's ideas about Safe Withdrawal Rates to be an excellent use of my time. It has always been interesting and productive.

Have fun.

John R.
hocus
Moderator
Posts: 435
Joined: Mon Dec 02, 2002 12:56 am

Post by hocus »

It is something that you are doing. You respond to baiting. You reply whenever you see a post that is directed specifically at you. That is what you are doing wrong. Sometimes, you need to force yourself to keep quiet.

I have a philosophy of posting that I adopted long before this debate began. One of my core beliefs re discussion boards is that, if a poster does not have something significant to add to a discussion, it is best if he or she keep quiet. If you check my record going back to the beginning of my posting career, you will see that I have always followed this rule. I choose particular threads on which I have something to offer, and limit myself to participation on those. I have views on ideas put forward on all sorts of other issues raised on all other sorts of threads, of course. But my longstanding rule has been to limit my participation to a small number of discussions, generally the ones in which I have already added something previously.

This philosophy cuts two ways. It means that I post rarely when the community is talking about subjects in which I do not hold a special interest. There have been long time periods in which I have posted little or not at all, and I think that's the way it should be. But this philosophy also means that I have a responsibility to post when an issue comes up in which my earlier comments have played a role. I haven't responded to every comment that has been specifically directed at me in the course of this debate. Far from it. But I have responded to as many as I possibly could. Not because I enjoy doing so or because I have lots of free time to kill. I response when I am able to because I have an obligation to the community to help when it is struggling with issues that have been put before it because of something that I put on the table at an earlier time.

The SWR issue is my issue. I am the one who put up the May 13, 2002, post. I don't think it is right for someone to put up a post like that and then just run and hide. That posts reveals the invalidity of investment strategies that many people for a long time had accepted as effective. People naturally have questions about the ideas that were put forward in that post and the ideas that flowed from consideration of it. I am the individual who put those ideas on the table, and I am under an obligation to help people come to terms with them.

Obviously., I am also under an obligation to deal with the questions and comments that my posts have generated in a constructive manner. Some of the things I have put forward argue for huge changes in the way that people think about investing. It's natural that people are going to get a little upset in giving consideration to these sorts of ideas. If you look back in history to times when people had to come to terms with changes of the type that we are talking about in The Great Debate, you will see that people got upset at those earlier times too. Change is disturbing, OK? For a whole host of reasons that I won't go into right now. Coming to terms with change is hard and people need to let off steam from time to time. There is nothing wrong with that so long as the amount of steam let off is kept somewhere within the range of what is reasonable. It is part of a process of going from Place A, where we are, to Place B, where we want to be.

You are making a mistake similar to the one that BenSolar made earlier in this thread in some of your comments in this post. There is a strong suggestion in your comments that the discussions we have had in recent weeks have not been fruitful ones. I don't agree. The discussions have been messy, to be sure. There has been some ugliness, to be sure. But that is all part of the wonderful game called Learning Together. It's like a doctor cutting out a diseased organ. He has to do it, right? It's a good thing he is doing. But there's an awful lot of blood on the floor at the moment he is performing the operation. That's the way it works. It's a mistake to focus on the blood and lose perspective as to what is really going on. What is really going on is that the patient's long-term health is being enhanced.

So it is in The Great Debate. We know more about SWRs as a result of the discussions we have had over recent weeks. Lots more. That's good. Was every step in the process of learning a walk in the park? It was not. So what? We are here to learn, are we not? I sure am. So I learn. And I accept that sometimes that means taking some hits that I would not want to take if they did not come as part of a process that makes me a more informed investor in the future.

The blood on the floor is the price you pay for using a discussion board to learn. You can learn from a book or you can learn by sitting in your room thinking things over. I have done it those ways, and I have developed lots of insights from doing it those ways. But I have gained from adding the discussion board way to the mix.

The discussion board way adds a dimension that is not present when you are trying to learn those other ways. The added dimension is the human dimension. Here, I don't just write the insights down on a piece of paper. Here, I get feedback on the ideas. Feedback is valuable, JWR1945. It tells you things that you never could figure out from reading a book or thinking things over by yourself in a quiet room. I still read books and I still think things over by myself. But in recent years I have adopted the practice of sharing what I learn on discussion boards too. As a result, I have learned a whole bunch more about a whole bunch of important stuff.

You are a numbers guy, JWR1945. You obviously are a whole lot more than just that, but that is the part that I get to see most often. Because you are a numbers guy, you have a tendency to see things from the perspective of numbers. You think numbers are terribly important. When it comes to discussions of SWRs, you are right. Numbers are a very important part of the story. But they are not the whole story.

The most important part of this story is the emotional aspect of it, the reaction that knowing the true SWR provokes in people. That is the real story here, and to understand that story well, you need something other than a facility with numbers. You need a different sort of facility, one that comes from knowing how people operate in advancing their wills and how emotions come into play in people's attempts to come to understand things, and in how change has been incorporated into people's thinking at earlier times in history, and other things of that sort. That sort of thing is my area of expertise. It is because of my strength re that sort of thing that I have emerged as the leader of The Great Debate.

It's comical that I have emerged as a leader in a debate in which the calculation of numbers plays such an important role. It's one of those funny little tricks that God plays on us from time to time. I have become the leader not because I understand numbers better than anyone else. I obviously do not. I have become the leader because I understand the emotions (not entirely, but better than anyone else who has participated in the discussions thus far). This is only in part a debate about numbers. It is more than 50 percent a debate about human emotions and how people cope with changes. That stuff is a key part of the story.

You have put forward some wonderful research that has not received nearly the attention it deserves. Your research will receive the attention it deserves in time, but that is not going to happen anytime real soon. People are not yet prepared to look at the numbers, JWR1945. We could have an angel come down from the sky and declare "I am the angel of SWRs, and I am here to tell you that the SWR in the year 2000 was 2 percent" and it wouldn't matter. People would say "oh, that angel might really be a devil in disguise, how do we know for sure?" or "Does anyone have a tape recording of what the angel said, I think some of us might be misunderstanding the message" or other things of that sort. People don't want to know, JWR1945. You coming up with more and more data proving the point does not make any difference in the short term because they do not want to know.

It's not always going to be like that. There is going to be a day when people are going to be awed by the research you have done and the insights you (and many others) have offered. All this is going to come to pass. But not now. At the moment we are working our way through the emotional stage of the debate. That's the part where I carry the flag. When we turn to the data stuff, I will be taking a seat in the back row and listening in but rarely participating. That sort of thing is not what I am good at, and there are a good number of others who can explore the data stuff better than I can. So I will keep my mouth shut when we get to that stage. What the community needs now is someone with insights into the emotional side of the SWR story. That's why I am playing the lead role for now.

You are suggesting that I not respond when someone puts up an emotion-laden post. How do you think we are ever going to get to the point where people deal with the data if there is no one to respond to the things that people have on their minds today? Someone has to respond to this stuff, or the community is never going to be able to come to terms with it. I would be thrilled to see some others step forward and relieve me of the burden a bit. But do you see anyone rushing to the front of the room to fill in for me when I am busy with other stuff? I do not. I've been assigned the task by default.

Now, it is not always best to respond directly to an emotion-laden post. If that is your point, then I agree. There are times when it is best to respond and there are times when it is best just to let the words hang out there. I employ judgment in determining which is the best strategy re a particular post. I do not respond to all so-called baiting posts or even to emotion-laden non-baiting posts. I pick and choose with the aim of responding to the questions that are genuinely of concern to the FIRE comnmunity.

The questions that PeteyPerson was putting forward in some posts of his from earlier in this thread were matters of genuine community concern, in my judgment. So I responded to those. It's the same with the Wanderer comments and the BenSolar comments. Those comments and questions merited responses, in my view. By responding to those sorts of posts, I hope that I am helping the community find its way to an appreciation of the realities of SWRs. There are other sorts of posts to which it is best not to respond.

If Ataloss puts up a post in which he quotes something I said in an earlier post, what need is there to respond? He is letting people know what I think on an issue. He doesn't agree, clearly, but nonetheless he is putting forward my ideas in my own words. I find nothing to fault in that. People can agree with my words or with his words. People can make up their own minds based on what they read on the screen. I think it is entirely possible that some of those posts will serve a constructive purpose when all is said and done.

Has Ataloss engaged in baiting? Yes, I think so. Not in the posts in which he quoted me, I don't think. Perhaps there is some baiting intent in those posts, but the good outweighs the bad in those, in my view. The more problemmatic ones, in my view, were the earlier ones in which he used his words to describe my views. Those I see as genuinely damaging to the community because they sow confusion as to what I really think and the record re what I think on SWRs is more than confused enough already. Those are the ones that worry me a lot more than the so-called baiting ones. I'm a big boy, I can take baiting. Protect the community (not me so much) from misleading posts, and you will be doing a great service.

The baiting is not a good thing, but it is a small thing in the grand scheme of things. If we all develop a reasonable understanding of how SWRs work, the baiting will disappear without us having to take any particular efforts to make it happen.

There has been baiting in an objective sense. But it appears to me that the intent behind many of these posts is not baiting. The posts are the result of a confused undertanding of the SWR concept. The tone is the result of frustration over the difficulty of coming to terms with the issues. Address this frustration and the tone will take care of itself, in my view. The key to addressing the frustration is protecting the community from the confusion spread in many of the posts that cannot be fairly characterized as baiting posts.

The extent of the confusion is quite remarkable. My best way of showing this is to point to your own struggles in coming to terms with this issue, JWR1945. You understand the numbers ten times better than me. But look at what you said in a post from a week ago or so. You said that only recenty have you come to realize that "4" is not the SWR for 1929. We have been talking about this for 14 months and someone with your background is only now beginning to develop an understanding of the ABCs. By no means do I mean to be critical of you in my comments here. But you understand this stuff (at least in a technical sense) better than just about anyone. Understanding the definition of the key terms is about as basic as it gets. But you didn't come to an understanding of what an SWR is until 14 months into the debate. Does appreciation of that reality give you some idea of the extent of the struggle that others are having coming to terms with this stuff?

It's not that the definition of SWR is something terribly hard to understand. I understood the definition the first time I read the intercst study. It took me all of 15 minutes to see the flaws in the methodology he employed. I didn't even read the study carefully. I skimmed it. If I could understand this stuff in 15 minutes, just about any reasonably intelligent person could understand it in 15 minutes. But it took you, a more than reasonably intelligent person, a whole bunch more than 15 minutes. It took you 14 months! What's that about?

It's about change, JWR1945. You are not dumb. You are smart. But making sense of this stuff is a terribly difficult struggle. It takes lots of effort and lots of time. Why? Because it is all so new and so different. Yes, Bernstein says much of it in Chapter Two of his book. But how many really understand what Bernstein says in Chapter Two? Very few. Personally, I question whether Bernstein himself fully appreciates what he said in Chapter Two. He is a few steps ahead of most of the rest of us. But my sense is that he is struggling in his own mind with many of the questions that the FIRE community has been struggling with over the course of The Great Debate.

The issues we are struggling with here are huge, JWR1945. We are talking about whether it is possible to time the market and make huge profits from doing so. We are talking about whether it is possible to determine the intrinsic value of a stock investment prior to putting your money into it. We are talking about whether Jeremy Siegel made a big mistake in saying that stocks are always the best investment class if you are investing for the long term. This is not tiddlywinks we are playing here. We are talking about strategies that could help aspiring early retirees gain investment results that leave them hundreds of thousands of dollars richer, that allow them to achieve their financial independence goals years sooner. This is the real turtle soup, and not the mock.

We are all struggling. The FIRE community cares deeply about these issues. If it didn't care deeply, we would have stopped talking about this a long, long time ago, don't you think? We can't stop. People try to put up non-SWR threads from time to time and something stops others from participating too much. You know what it is? Nothing else seems significant enough compared to what we have been focusing on for the past 14 (just days short of 15 now) months. Everything else pales in comparison. Everything else is a bore. This is the discussion that matters most for the FIRE community. By a factor of about 10.

We need you doing the numbers stuff. Your numbers stuff is of great value, and when the day comes when people are able to come to terms with the numbers, the work you have done will be a huge help to them in making sense of all this. You need to keep doing that sort of research. Your work will gain the appreciation it deserves at a later date.

But you need to understand that there are other things on the table that also need to be addressed. You can't get from here to there on the power of data alone. We are human beings, not data machines. How much money we have affects our ability to achieve our life goals. The issues put on the table during The Great Debate affect our expectations of how much money we are going to have in the future. You can't talk about money issues in such a big way and not have emotions find their way into the mix, OK? It cannot be done.

Now, there need to be limits placed on the ways in which emotions are expressed in discussion board posts. I think that ES hits it on the head when he argues that we need to learn how to agree to disagree. At times people just need to accept that there are people out in the universe somewhere who do not share their particular views and just let it go. There are times when community leaders needs to step forward and ask that some lines be given recognition. There are different ways to express disagreement, some acceptable and some not, and we need to all gain a little more backbone in stepping forward and letting people know when thay have crossed a line. I am in favor of all that.

What I am not in favor of is the suggestion in your post that we try to bury the emotional stuff, pretend that it is not there. People have genuine feelings on this matter, strong feelings, and they have a need to express those feelings. They have a right to have those feelings given expression in the form of questions or comments and they have a right to have theor concerns takenn seriously and they have a right to see responses to those questions or comments put up for the entire community to think about.. That is how things get sorted out. That sort of thing does not ruin a discussion board, that sort of thing is the whole point of the project. It is human beings working together to share views on subjects of mutual concern that makes discussion boards special, that allows this new communications medium to provide something of value that earlier ones did not.

People need to distinguish between constructive efforts to deal with the emotional questions re this matter and destructive efforts to do so. We have seen lots of examples of both in the course of the debate. We need to encourage the constructive stuff and discourage the destructive stuff. We all have a role to play. This is not a television show. It is a community. In communities, people learn that there is a need for rules, there are lines that should not be crossed. The entire community suffers when those lines are crossed, not just the one poster at whom the line-crossing post was directed. We all need to play more of a role in seeing that differences of opinion are aired in reasonable ways. That doesn't mean saying "you can't discuss the emotional stuff that is troubling you." It means saying, "you may discuss whatever is of greatest concern to you, buy you must make the effort to frame your questions and comments in such a way that they help the community's efforts to come to terms with this stuff rather than send us reeling backwards."

I will add that nobody understood my Blunt Words post. I had tried not to be harsh. I was not at all concerned about the Motley Fool. I was concerned about baiting on these boards. It appears impossible to use even the mildest forms of subtlety on discussion boards.

Everyone understood the post, JWR1945. You didn't deal with the real issues. Your intent was 100 percent good. The execution was less than perfect. This stuff is hard. No one gets it right each and every time. You have tried harder than anyone else, so there is no criticism intended in my words here. But I don't think that the problem is that your words were too subtle. It's that you held yourself back from dealing with the real issues. It is hard to work up the courage to deal with the real issues re this matter. I struggle to do it a lot, and it is not an easy business. It has been a big struggle for me and I mean no criticism in noting that it has apparantly been a big struggle for you too.

We just need to keep working it. We need to keep perspective. We are doing great. We are way ahead of just about anyone else. We need to focus on the good we have done rather than the bad that we have experienced so that we do not lose heart.

I will put up a post at some later date on the "About This Board" thread going into a bit more detail about my plans for next year and making some suggestions about how people who want to help on this (that means you!) could do the most good at this particular moment. The best thing that you can do at this time, in my view, is to continue to develop the insights that you have come up with re dividends. That stuff has great potential, and it is worth taking the time to develop it as fully as possible.

If you reach a point where you feel that you have done all that you can in that regard, I have lots of ideas for productive things to which you could direct your energies. I don't want to push too hard, but if you get to a point where you are discouraged that things are not moving forward fast enough with just the two of us manning the oars, I think you need to step back and try to regain perspective. We got this far by allowing both the data and the emotions to take us where they want to take us, and that is how we will cover the remaining distance as well. Getting discouraged holds us back. There is nothing to get discouraged about. We are doing just fine.
peteyperson
**** Heavy Hitter
Posts: 525
Joined: Tue Nov 26, 2002 6:46 am

Post by peteyperson »

Is there any way that hocus can have a word limit imposed on him?

This is insane. I know he wrote a good Motley Fool extended article, so he is capable of editing things down to a reasonable length.

<sigh>

Petey
hocus wrote:It is something that you are doing. You respond to baiting. You reply whenever you see a post that is directed specifically at you. That is what you are doing wrong. Sometimes, you need to force yourself to keep quiet.

I have a philosophy of posting that I adopted long before this debate began. One of my core beliefs re discussion boards is that, if a poster does not have something significant to add to a discussion, it is best if he or she keep quiet. If you check my record going back to the beginning of my posting career, you will see that I have always followed this rule. I choose particular threads on which I have something to offer, and limit myself to participation on those. I have views on ideas put forward on all sorts of other issues raised on all other sorts of threads, of course. But my longstanding rule has been to limit my participation to a small number of discussions, generally the ones in which I have already added something previously.

This philosophy cuts two ways. It means that I post rarely when the community is talking about subjects in which I do not hold a special interest. There have been long time periods in which I have posted little or not at all, and I think that's the way it should be. But this philosophy also means that I have a responsibility to post when an issue comes up in which my earlier comments have played a role. I haven't responded to every comment that has been specifically directed at me in the course of this debate. Far from it. But I have responded to as many as I possibly could. Not because I enjoy doing so or because I have lots of free time to kill. I response when I am able to because I have an obligation to the community to help when it is struggling with issues that have been put before it because of something that I put on the table at an earlier time.

The SWR issue is my issue. I am the one who put up the May 13, 2002, post. I don't think it is right for someone to put up a post like that and then just run and hide. That posts reveals the invalidity of investment strategies that many people for a long time had accepted as effective. People naturally have questions about the ideas that were put forward in that post and the ideas that flowed from consideration of it. I am the individual who put those ideas on the table, and I am under an obligation to help people come to terms with them.

Obviously., I am also under an obligation to deal with the questions and comments that my posts have generated in a constructive manner. Some of the things I have put forward argue for huge changes in the way that people think about investing. It's natural that people are going to get a little upset in giving consideration to these sorts of ideas. If you look back in history to times when people had to come to terms with changes of the type that we are talking about in The Great Debate, you will see that people got upset at those earlier times too. Change is disturbing, OK? For a whole host of reasons that I won't go into right now. Coming to terms with change is hard and people need to let off steam from time to time. There is nothing wrong with that so long as the amount of steam let off is kept somewhere within the range of what is reasonable. It is part of a process of going from Place A, where we are, to Place B, where we want to be.

You are making a mistake similar to the one that BenSolar made earlier in this thread in some of your comments in this post. There is a strong suggestion in your comments that the discussions we have had in recent weeks have not been fruitful ones. I don't agree. The discussions have been messy, to be sure. There has been some ugliness, to be sure. But that is all part of the wonderful game called Learning Together. It's like a doctor cutting out a diseased organ. He has to do it, right? It's a good thing he is doing. But there's an awful lot of blood on the floor at the moment he is performing the operation. That's the way it works. It's a mistake to focus on the blood and lose perspective as to what is really going on. What is really going on is that the patient's long-term health is being enhanced.

So it is in The Great Debate. We know more about SWRs as a result of the discussions we have had over recent weeks. Lots more. That's good. Was every step in the process of learning a walk in the park? It was not. So what? We are here to learn, are we not? I sure am. So I learn. And I accept that sometimes that means taking some hits that I would not want to take if they did not come as part of a process that makes me a more informed investor in the future.

The blood on the floor is the price you pay for using a discussion board to learn. You can learn from a book or you can learn by sitting in your room thinking things over. I have done it those ways, and I have developed lots of insights from doing it those ways. But I have gained from adding the discussion board way to the mix.

The discussion board way adds a dimension that is not present when you are trying to learn those other ways. The added dimension is the human dimension. Here, I don't just write the insights down on a piece of paper. Here, I get feedback on the ideas. Feedback is valuable, JWR1945. It tells you things that you never could figure out from reading a book or thinking things over by yourself in a quiet room. I still read books and I still think things over by myself. But in recent years I have adopted the practice of sharing what I learn on discussion boards too. As a result, I have learned a whole bunch more about a whole bunch of important stuff.

You are a numbers guy, JWR1945. You obviously are a whole lot more than just that, but that is the part that I get to see most often. Because you are a numbers guy, you have a tendency to see things from the perspective of numbers. You think numbers are terribly important. When it comes to discussions of SWRs, you are right. Numbers are a very important part of the story. But they are not the whole story.

The most important part of this story is the emotional aspect of it, the reaction that knowing the true SWR provokes in people. That is the real story here, and to understand that story well, you need something other than a facility with numbers. You need a different sort of facility, one that comes from knowing how people operate in advancing their wills and how emotions come into play in people's attempts to come to understand things, and in how change has been incorporated into people's thinking at earlier times in history, and other things of that sort. That sort of thing is my area of expertise. It is because of my strength re that sort of thing that I have emerged as the leader of The Great Debate.

It's comical that I have emerged as a leader in a debate in which the calculation of numbers plays such an important role. It's one of those funny little tricks that God plays on us from time to time. I have become the leader not because I understand numbers better than anyone else. I obviously do not. I have become the leader because I understand the emotions (not entirely, but better than anyone else who has participated in the discussions thus far). This is only in part a debate about numbers. It is more than 50 percent a debate about human emotions and how people cope with changes. That stuff is a key part of the story.

You have put forward some wonderful research that has not received nearly the attention it deserves. Your research will receive the attention it deserves in time, but that is not going to happen anytime real soon. People are not yet prepared to look at the numbers, JWR1945. We could have an angel come down from the sky and declare "I am the angel of SWRs, and I am here to tell you that the SWR in the year 2000 was 2 percent" and <i>it wouldn't matter.</i> People would say "oh, that angel might really be a devil in disguise, how do we know for sure?" or "Does anyone have a tape recording of what the angel said, I think some of us might be misunderstanding the message" or other things of that sort. People don't want to know, JWR1945. You coming up with more and more data proving the point does not make any difference in the short term because they do not want to know.

It's not always going to be like that. There is going to be a day when people are going to be awed by the research you have done and the insights you (and many others) have offered. All this is going to come to pass. But not now. At the moment we are working our way through the emotional stage of the debate. That's the part where I carry the flag. When we turn to the data stuff, I will be taking a seat in the back row and listening in but rarely participating. That sort of thing is not what I am good at, and there are a good number of others who can explore the data stuff better than I can. So I will keep my mouth shut when we get to that stage. What the community needs now is someone with insights into the emotional side of the SWR story. That's why I am playing the lead role for now.

You are suggesting that I not respond when someone puts up an emotion-laden post. How do you think we are ever going to get to the point where people deal with the data if there is no one to respond to the things that people have on their minds today? Someone has to respond to this stuff, or the community is never going to be able to come to terms with it. I would be thrilled to see some others step forward and relieve me of the burden a bit. But do you see anyone rushing to the front of the room to fill in for me when I am busy with other stuff? I do not. I've been assigned the task by default.

Now, it is not always best to respond directly to an emotion-laden post. If that is your point, then I agree. There are times when it is best to respond and there are times when it is best just to let the words hang out there. I employ judgment in determining which is the best strategy re a particular post. I do not respond to all so-called baiting posts or even to emotion-laden non-baiting posts. I pick and choose with the aim of responding to the questions that are genuinely of concern to the FIRE comnmunity.

The questions that PeteyPerson was putting forward in some posts of his from earlier in this thread were matters of genuine community concern, in my judgment. So I responded to those. It's the same with the Wanderer comments and the BenSolar comments. Those comments and questions merited responses, in my view. By responding to those sorts of posts, I hope that I am helping the community find its way to an appreciation of the realities of SWRs. There are other sorts of posts to which it is best not to respond.

If Ataloss puts up a post in which he quotes something I said in an earlier post, what need is there to respond? He is letting people know what I think on an issue. He doesn't agree, clearly, but nonetheless he is putting forward my ideas in my own words. I find nothing to fault in that. People can agree with my words or with his words. People can make up their own minds based on what they read on the screen. I think it is entirely possible that some of those posts will serve a constructive purpose when all is said and done.

Has Ataloss engaged in baiting? Yes, I think so. Not in the posts in which he quoted me, I don't think. Perhaps there is some baiting intent in those posts, but the good outweighs the bad in those, in my view. The more problemmatic ones, in my view, were the earlier ones in which he used his words to describe my views. Those I see as genuinely damaging to the community because they sow confusion as to what I really think and the record re what I think on SWRs is more than confused enough already. Those are the ones that worry me a lot more than the so-called baiting ones. I'm a big boy, I can take baiting. Protect the community (not me so much) from misleading posts, and you will be doing a great service.

The baiting is not a good thing, but it is a small thing in the grand scheme of things. If we all develop a reasonable understanding of how SWRs work, the baiting will disappear without us having to take any particular efforts to make it happen.

There has been baiting in an objective sense. But it appears to me that the intent behind many of these posts is not baiting. The posts are the result of a confused undertanding of the SWR concept. The tone is the result of frustration over the difficulty of coming to terms with the issues. Address this frustration and the tone will take care of itself, in my view. The key to addressing the frustration is protecting the community from the confusion spread in many of the posts that cannot be fairly characterized as baiting posts.

The extent of the confusion is quite remarkable. My best way of showing this is to point to your own struggles in coming to terms with this issue, JWR1945. You understand the numbers ten times better than me. But look at what you said in a post from a week ago or so. You said that only recenty have you come to realize that "4" is not the SWR for 1929. We have been talking about this for 14 months and someone with your background is only now beginning to develop an understanding of the ABCs. By no means do I mean to be critical of you in my comments here. But you understand this stuff (at least in a technical sense) better than just about anyone. Understanding the definition of the key terms is about as basic as it gets. But you didn't come to an understanding of what an SWR is until 14 months into the debate. Does appreciation of that reality give you some idea of the extent of the struggle that others are having coming to terms with this stuff?

It's not that the definition of SWR is something terribly hard to understand. I understood the definition the first time I read the intercst study. It took me all of 15 minutes to see the flaws in the methodology he employed. I didn't even read the study carefully. I skimmed it. If I could understand this stuff in 15 minutes, just about any reasonably intelligent person could understand it in 15 minutes. But it took you, a more than reasonably intelligent person, a whole bunch more than 15 minutes. It took you 14 months! What's that about?

It's about change, JWR1945. You are not dumb. You are smart. But making sense of this stuff is a terribly difficult struggle. It takes lots of effort and lots of time. Why? Because it is all so new and so different. Yes, Bernstein says much of it in Chapter Two of his book. But how many really understand what Bernstein says in Chapter Two? Very few. Personally, I question whether Bernstein himself fully appreciates what he said in Chapter Two. He is a few steps ahead of most of the rest of us. But my sense is that he is struggling in his own mind with many of the questions that the FIRE community has been struggling with over the course of The Great Debate.

The issues we are struggling with here are huge, JWR1945. We are talking about whether it is possible to time the market and make huge profits from doing so. We are talking about whether it is possible to determine the intrinsic value of a stock investment prior to putting your money into it. We are talking about whether Jeremy Siegel made a big mistake in saying that stocks are always the best investment class if you are investing for the long term. This is not tiddlywinks we are playing here. We are talking about strategies that could help aspiring early retirees gain investment results that leave them hundreds of thousands of dollars richer, that allow them to achieve their financial independence goals years sooner. This is the real turtle soup, and not the mock.

We are all struggling. The FIRE community cares deeply about these issues. If it didn't care deeply, we would have stopped talking about this a long, long time ago, don't you think? We can't stop. People try to put up non-SWR threads from time to time and something stops others from participating too much. You know what it is? Nothing else seems significant enough compared to what we have been focusing on for the past 14 (just days short of 15 now) months. Everything else pales in comparison. Everything else is a bore. This is the discussion that matters most for the FIRE community. By a factor of about 10.

We need you doing the numbers stuff. Your numbers stuff is of great value, and when the day comes when people are able to come to terms with the numbers, the work you have done will be a huge help to them in making sense of all this. You need to keep doing that sort of research. Your work will gain the appreciation it deserves at a later date.

But you need to understand that there are other things on the table that also need to be addressed. You can't get from here to there on the power of data alone. We are human beings, not data machines. How much money we have affects our ability to achieve our life goals. The issues put on the table during The Great Debate affect our expectations of how much money we are going to have in the future. You can't talk about money issues in such a big way and not have emotions find their way into the mix, OK? It cannot be done.

Now, there need to be limits placed on the ways in which emotions are expressed in discussion board posts. I think that ES hits it on the head when he argues that we need to learn how to agree to disagree. At times people just need to accept that there are people out in the universe somewhere who do not share their particular views and just let it go. There are times when community leaders needs to step forward and ask that some lines be given recognition. There are different ways to express disagreement, some acceptable and some not, and we need to all gain a little more backbone in stepping forward and letting people know when thay have crossed a line. I am in favor of all that.

What I am not in favor of is the suggestion in your post that we try to bury the emotional stuff, pretend that it is not there. People have genuine feelings on this matter, strong feelings, and they have a need to express those feelings. They have a right to have those feelings given expression in the form of questions or comments and they have a right to have theor concerns takenn seriously and they have a right to see responses to those questions or comments put up for the entire community to think about.. That is how things get sorted out. That sort of thing does not ruin a discussion board, that sort of thing is the whole point of the project. It is human beings working together to share views on subjects of mutual concern that makes discussion boards special, that allows this new communications medium to provide something of value that earlier ones did not.

People need to distinguish between constructive efforts to deal with the emotional questions re this matter and destructive efforts to do so. We have seen lots of examples of both in the course of the debate. We need to encourage the constructive stuff and discourage the destructive stuff. We all have a role to play. This is not a television show. It is a community. In communities, people learn that there is a need for rules, there are lines that should not be crossed. The entire community suffers when those lines are crossed, not just the one poster at whom the line-crossing post was directed. We all need to play more of a role in seeing that differences of opinion are aired in reasonable ways. That doesn't mean saying "you can't discuss the emotional stuff that is troubling you." It means saying, "you may discuss whatever is of greatest concern to you, buy you must make the effort to frame your questions and comments in such a way that they help the community's efforts to come to terms with this stuff rather than send us reeling backwards."

I will add that nobody understood my Blunt Words post. I had tried not to be harsh. I was not at all concerned about the Motley Fool. I was concerned about baiting on these boards. It appears impossible to use even the mildest forms of subtlety on discussion boards.

Everyone understood the post, JWR1945. You didn't deal with the real issues. Your intent was 100 percent good. The execution was less than perfect. This stuff is hard. No one gets it right each and every time. You have tried harder than anyone else, so there is no criticism intended in my words here. But I don't think that the problem is that your words were too subtle. It's that you held yourself back from dealing with the real issues. It is hard to work up the courage to deal with the real issues re this matter. I struggle to do it a lot, and it is not an easy business. It has been a big struggle for me and I mean no criticism in noting that it has apparantly been a big struggle for you too.

We just need to keep working it. We need to keep perspective. We are doing great. We are way ahead of just about anyone else. We need to focus on the good we have done rather than the bad that we have experienced so that we do not lose heart.

I will put up a post at some later date on the "About This Board" thread going into a bit more detail about my plans for next year and making some suggestions about how people who want to help on this (that means you!) could do the most good at this particular moment. The best thing that you can do at this time, in my view, is to continue to develop the insights that you have come up with re dividends. That stuff has great potential, and it is worth taking the time to develop it as fully as possible.

If you reach a point where you feel that you have done all that you can in that regard, I have lots of ideas for productive things to which you could direct your energies. I don't want to push too hard, but if you get to a point where you are discouraged that things are not moving forward fast enough with just the two of us manning the oars, I think you need to step back and try to regain perspective. We got this far by allowing both the data and the emotions to take us where they want to take us, and that is how we will cover the remaining distance as well. Getting discouraged holds us back. There is nothing to get discouraged about. We are doing just fine.
hocus
Moderator
Posts: 435
Joined: Mon Dec 02, 2002 12:56 am

Post by hocus »

Is there any way that hocus can have a word limit imposed on him?

When Bob Dylan released his "Time Out of Mind" album, there were some who complained that the song "Highlands," clocking in at over 17 minutes, was "too long." They asked Dylan: "Why couldn't you have recorded a shortened version for use on the album?"

He looked at them funny. "That is the shortened version," he explained. "The original was 22 minutes."

I always try to edit my posts down to a disgestible length before posting. Someday, I'll have to do an "outtakes" version of a post so all can see how much good stuff I have to leave on the cutting room floor to do that.

Are there any sections of that post that you feel could have been left out without doing serious damage to the community's ability to make sense of the issues, Pete?
User avatar
BenSolar
*** Veteran
Posts: 242
Joined: Mon Nov 25, 2002 5:46 am
Location: Western NC

HSWR is OK now?

Post by BenSolar »

hocus wrote:That said, both raddr and BenSolar have made big mistakes in the course of this thing. The idea that BenSolar was pushing for awhile, that we should put little "h's" and little "f's" in front of the capital letters "SWR" was a disaster. That lost us a lot of time. His intent was good. The initiative was a big mistake.
I guess hocus has changed his mind about the idea of using the acronym HSWR: from Dory's board:
I propose a change in terminology. I propose that we begin referring to the conventional methodology number as the "historical surviving withdrawal rate (HSWR)."
"Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things only hoped for." - Epicurus
User avatar
ataloss
**** Heavy Hitter
Posts: 559
Joined: Mon Nov 25, 2002 3:00 am

Post by ataloss »

I think hocus makes a good point here

:lol:

Pretty funny, he has apparently been posting there under the alias McBeaned for quite a while, making funny comments on the whole undying hocus mania on that board. :D The cat is out of the bag now. :shock:
Have fun.

Ataloss
User avatar
BenSolar
*** Veteran
Posts: 242
Joined: Mon Nov 25, 2002 5:46 am
Location: Western NC

Post by BenSolar »

Hocus has informed me on the TMF REHP board (in a post he apparently intended to email only) that his position on 'hSWR' hasn't changed.
ataloss wrote:I think hocus makes a good point here

:lol:

Pretty funny, he has apparently been posting there under the alias McBeaned for quite a while, making funny comments on the whole undying hocus mania on that board. :D The cat is out of the bag now. :shock:
"Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things only hoped for." - Epicurus
User avatar
ataloss
**** Heavy Hitter
Posts: 559
Joined: Mon Nov 25, 2002 3:00 am

Post by ataloss »

I have done that post to board when I meant to send as a pm ;)
Have fun.

Ataloss
User avatar
BenSolar
*** Veteran
Posts: 242
Joined: Mon Nov 25, 2002 5:46 am
Location: Western NC

Post by BenSolar »

ataloss wrote:I have done that post to board when I meant to send as a pm ;)
Me too. :)
"Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things only hoped for." - Epicurus
User avatar
BenSolar
*** Veteran
Posts: 242
Joined: Mon Nov 25, 2002 5:46 am
Location: Western NC

Post by BenSolar »

I wrote:he has apparently been posting there under the alias McBeaned for quite a while, making funny comments on the whole undying hocus mania on that board. :D The cat is out of the bag now. :shock:
I hope they don't kill McBeaned over this. Nice to see hocus showing a side that isn't SWR obsessed.
"Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things only hoped for." - Epicurus
User avatar
ataloss
**** Heavy Hitter
Posts: 559
Joined: Mon Nov 25, 2002 3:00 am

Post by ataloss »

asdf
Have fun.

Ataloss
Post Reply