For "TH"
Posted: Sat Jun 12, 2004 2:37 am
You are a newcomer to this, TH, so you bring to it a fresh perspective. I would like to ask you for some advice.
My portfolio is comprised of three asset classes--TIPS and ibonds paying roughly a 3.5 percent real return and CDs which will be converted into long-term stock holdings when the valuation level for stocks falls to such a point that such purchases are consistent with my 4 percent annual take-out number. JWR1945, our resident Numbers Guy, says that the SWR for each of these asset classes is in excess of 4 percent. Thus, the plan appears to me to be a reasonably safe one.
In the "Yahoo Finance Quiz"Â thread at the Early Retirement Forum, I asked intercst his view as to whether my retirement plan is reasonably safe. He did not respond to the question.
I wanted to see what he would say on that forum, but the reality is that I knew his view on the question before I asked it. He has said hundreds of times in hundreds of different ways that there is zero chance that my plan will survive and that anyone who thinks that it is possible that this plan will survive is suffering from mental illness.
My guess is that these sound like extreme statements to you. If these statements were coming from someone other than intercst, they would not cause me much trouble in my effort to inform community members of the realities of SWRs. If these statements came forth from "Poster X," people would assume that "Poster X" is a nutcase. I could safely ignore the statements of "Poster X" and continue about the business of telling the story of the realities of SWRs.
Intercst is not "Poster X." He has a special status in these communities for three reasons. One is that he has been posting at them daily for five years now; he has lots of friends. Two is that he started the first board, the Motley Fool board, and is thus viewed by many as the founder of our little movement. Three is that he is the author of a study on SWRs that many community members have rightly found to be of great value and that has received endorsements from Scott Burns and others of similar stature.
When intercst says something re SWRs, community members listen. Most community members have not performed independent research on the questions we discuss at this board. They put their trust in fellow community members who have gained reputations as experts. Intercst is widely viewed as the ultimate expert on SWRs at the various FIRE/Passion Saving/Retire Early boards.
When intercst says that my plan is not a reasonably safe plan, he is engaging in deliberate deception. He is not making a mistake when he says that my plan cannot survive because I am invested 100 percent in "fixed-income" assets and his study proves that fixed-income assets can never support more than a 2.3 percent take-out number. He has been corrected on this point scores of times. Still, he continues to say it. I can provide you with any number of links supporting this assertion.
Learning is achieved through a building block process. The first step in learning how to read Shakespeare is learning the ABCs, If you skip that step and go directly to "King Lear," it will appear to you that the pages are filled with scribbles that have no meaning. You would be wrong in thinking this, but it would be understandable why you came to this conclusion if you did not possess the ability to put letters together into words and words together into sentences.
For community members to come to understand the realities of SWRs that are understood by me and JWR1945 and William Bernstein, we need to start by achieving a general consensus on the most basic factual questions. The question of whether my plan is a reasonably safe one is a basic factual question. We should all possess a good sense of the right answer to that question at this point, given how much time we have spent on this matter.
We don't. JWR1945 says in no uncertain terms that my plan is reasonably safe. Intercst says in no uncertain terms that my plan is not by any stretch of the imagination safe. It is not possible that both of these experts are telling us the truth on this question. One of them is engaging in deliberate deception. We need to figure out who, so that we can ask that person to kindly knock off the funny business and thereby permit the community to get about the task of advancing its understanding of the realities of SWRs.
I will tell you my suggestion for how to deal with the problem. I think that we need to take action as a community insisting that intercst play by the rules. All the rest of us know what the rules are and play by them in our discussions with fellow community members. Intercst is an out-of-control poster. He needs to be reined in. It needs to be a community project.
I have been asking for help with this matter for a long time. There have been occasions when particularly courageous community members have stepped forward and provided it. I will provide you with three examples so that you have a sense of why these efforts have not had the desired effect until now.
Here is a link to a post from the Motley Fool board put forward by BenSolar and titled "The hocus Plan: 4 Percent from 100 Percent Fixed-Income?"
http://boards.fool.com/Message.asp?mid= ... sort=whole
I provide below the full text of the post for the benefit of those who do not have access to the Motley Fool board:
intercst wrote: hocus has been telling us for a year now that you can reliably take a 4% withdrawal from a 100% fixed income portfolio.
"This type of BS has been the largest contributor to the circus-like atmosphere that has surrounded hocus for the last year. Intercst, of course, isn't the only one to make statements like this. In fact they come so fast and furious from so many different people that a casual reader would swear they are true.
From hocus' 'My Plan' post (http://boards.fool.com/Message.asp?mid=17246781 )
excerpt:
<<<
Investments:
1) TIPS at 3.5 percent in tax-protected accounts
2) ibonds at 3.4 percent in non-protected accounts (not taxed until cashed in)
3) Certificates of Deposit still held from pre-retirement days (and, thus, held at higher rates than those available today.). The CDs are being phased out as they come due into other investment classes. I expect to move a portion of the CD money into stocks. If stock prices came down, I would move it all into stocks.
Stock Allocation Goal: My goal is to get to a 50 percent stock allocation. I initially made the zero percent allocation to stocks for two reasons:
(1) I accumulated all of my retirement stash in a short amount of time. It was nine years from having zero in the bank to retirement date. So any stock purchases made in anticipation of retirement would not have been "for the long term." My worst nightmare was that, one year short of my retirement date, stocks would go into a downturn. I was not counting the months until retirement, I was counting the weeks. There was no way I wanted to take the risk of losses that could put off the retirement date for years.
(2) Stocks were at extreme levels of overvaluation at the time I began accumulating large sums for investment. I preferred to put money ultimately to be allocated for stocks into safe investment classes until stocks could be purchased at prices closer to average valuations. That way, I can purchase many more shares for the same portion of my retirement stash. Once I find reasonable purchase points, I intend to hold the stocks for the long term (no "timing" in and out of the market).
>>>
Not listed there, but mentioned elsewhere in the post is the fact that he owns his home. So real estate can be added to the list.
So he has TIPS and I-bonds and real estate. All are inflation protected assets that do not fit under the 'Fixed Income' category. He also has a plan to buy stocks when valuations are closer to average. Here's a news flash: they are still overvalued.
In my post 'The Hocus Plan: 2% SWR?? (http://boards.fool.com/Message.asp?mid=18200598 )
I examined the effects of a stock switching strategy similar to the one described by hocus. My conclusion: history backs hocus up, his valuation based switching strategy from 0% stocks to 50% stocks worked in the past, and in fact beat the static 'optimal allocation'.
Hocus is the only person I know (if only via message board) who has completely opted out of participation in the stock market bubble. And you know what? He has benefited immensely from doing so. So why can't the 10-15 people who like to spout the cr@p like the quote above just grow up and lay off the elementary school tactics?"
The post was recommended by 32 community members. That means that there was broad support for the proposal put forward by BenSolar that intercst knock off the "bs." You participated in the "Yahoo Finance Quiz" thread. So you can judge for yourself whether the "bs" continues until this day.
Here is a link to a post by JWR1945 titled "Blunt Words."
http://nofeeboards.com/boards/viewtopic.php?t=1191
"These words are very blunt, but necessary. I am confident that I could prove all of these assertions if I were required to do so. I would prefer not to, however, since it would be tedious and time consuming.
"Intercst engages in a big lie strategy. Repeated often enough and loud enough, people will eventually believe a big lie. There is no way to defend oneself against it. You have to refute it convincingly every time it comes up. Many people will believe a big lie simply because someone is so insistent upon bringing it up. They assume that there must be a basis in fact even when there isn't. That is why intercst will prevail...at least, for another few months.
"A person caught as the target of a big lie is frozen. Defending himself quickly consumes all of his time. He finds himself reacting to everything as if he were in a big lie environment. He simply does not have time to respond properly. He simply does not have enough time to discern honest comments from dishonest ones. As such, he assumes, because he has to assume, that people understand the full context and history behind a remark. They don't and that causes problems.
"Please keep the big lie off of these boards. When you import the Motley Fool into these boards, you import the big lie with it. It is OK to raise questions as a result of your visiting those boards. Just don't bring those words into our environment. The big lie is hidden in them. You may not recognize it. I assure you that it is in them.
"I find fault with hocus in this one thing and this one thing only: he has an intense love, an intense passion, for what the Motley Fool discussion boards could be. Sadly, they are something less."
I think it is fair to presume that you have gained a little insight into how the Big Lie game is played by benefit of your participation on the "Yahoo Finance Quiz" thread. The community was enjoying a great learning experience on that thread until Intercst poisoned it with dirty posting. I asked that he kindly knock off the funny business and in response he asked Dory36 to revoke my posting privileges. Dory36 did not go along with that request but he also did not admonish intercst for his use of dirty posting tactics to distract the discussions. The result is that a number of community members at the Early Retirement Forum now know that future SWR discussions held there are likely to be unpleasant ones.
That hurts me in my efforts to explain the realities of SWRs to fellow community members. The SWR issue is a complex one, and the realities that I am bringing to people's attention are not ones that they start out being particularly happy to find out about. Most community members are fair-minded and most see that there is at least some truth to the points that I have brought forward. But very few are willing to participate in threads containing the sort of ugliness you see revealing itself near the end of the "Yahoo Finance Quiz" thread. My chances of getting reasonable community members to participate in future SWR threads at that forum has been diminished.
Intercst gained something from the use of those tactics. He put off the day that people will gain an informed understanding of what the historical data says re SWRs. It is obvious to me that that is why he makes use of these sorts of tactics so regularly. He does not actually believe that I am a troll anymore than he believes that I am the man in the moon. He knows from long experience that if he claims that I am a troll, it is unlikely that he will suffer negative consequences for doing so, and that my reputation and thus my ability to make my case effectively will be diminished.
Community members often stop participating in SWR discussions when these tactics are employed. In many cases, they have done more than that--they have up and left the community. Here is a post from FoolMeOnce in which he explains to the Motley Fool community why his conscience required him to do just that, given the way that the SWR discussions were conducted at that board. This post obtained 54 recommendations from fellow community members.
http://boards.fool.com/Message.asp?mid= ... sort=whole
"This will be my last post here. Thanks to all that have engaged in constructive posts on this board over the years. This board has degenerated into something that I can no longer be proud to be involved with. Even some folks that I respect, have thrown in with a board culture that cannot tell the difference between witty repartee and childish personal attacks. I was the one that FA'd Galeno. His attempts to incite others to engage in personal attacks, with the tacit support of some on this board, was one of the final straws for me."
The poster he is referring to as offering tacit support is intercst. Galeno asked that community members seek me out and engage in acts of physical violence against me to stop me from offering my views on SWRs at the Motley Fool board. At one point, he put forward a death threat. Several hours after the posting of the death threat, I received the first e-mail in a series that I ultimately received from Motley Fool relating to the termination of my posting privileges there. My guess is that the reason why the first e-mail from Motley Fool came within hours of the posting of the death threat is that Motley Fool lawyers were concerned re potential liabilities that might follow from some crazy person taking action on the threat. Intercst offered no words in opposition to the threat. He implicitly endorsed it, telling fellow community members that in his view Galeno was offering better suggestions for how to bring the SWR discussions to resolution than any other community member.
Motley Fool site administrators told me throughout their communications with me that they greatly valued my contributions to the site. They never accused me of breaking a posting rule. They said that their strong preference was that discussion on all on-topic questions be permitted at the board. The explanation that they gave me in the e-mail telling me of termination of my posting privileges is that they had suffered the loss of too many community members during the Great SWR Debate.
This sort of thing should never happen. No community member should ever feel bound by conscience to leave a posting community because the level of discourse has reached so low a level as to be intolerable to decent civilized people. But that is what has happened when questions have been raised at the Motley Fool boards re the methodology used by intercst in his study of SWRs.
We have diminished ourselves in how we have handled this matter. If we insisted that intercst play by the same rules as everyone else plays by, I believe that he would do it. But he is not going to do it unless we insist. If he can continue to get away with throwing spitballs, he will continue throwing spitballs. He has found it to be an effective tactic.
There is a name that intercst uses to refer to the four posters who have been bold enough to challenge him either on the methodology used in his study or on the tactics he has employed to defend it. Me, JWR1945, BenSolar, and FoolMeOnce are commonly referred to as "The Four Dimwits."Â It is rare for any community member to challenge this designation; long timers know what consequences follow from doing so. Mikey put up a post during the "Yahoo Finance Quiz" thread that intercst viewed as favoring "the side" questioning his SWR views and Mikey was quickly deemed "the Fifth Dimwit."Â No response from the community. This is what regulars at that board have come to know as business as usual.
This sort of stuff is killing us, in my view. It is killing all of us, including intercst. The reality of things is that his study is a valuable piece of work. The dishonesty he employs in making claims about it on discussion boards is in the long run going to greatly diminish the perceived value of his contributions. He is destroying himself and he is destroying all the rest of us in the process. I believe that responsible community members need to step forward and do something.
I don't believe that people should be saying that they agree with my views on SWRs. Most do not, so it would be wrong for people to do that. What people should be doing is saying that the tactics that have been used to block reasoned debate are unacceptable and must come to a quick end. Anyone who uses the word "troll"Â as a debating tactic should be given a warning that that sort of nonsense will not be tolerated. Anyone who ignores the warning should be removed from the community. That's my take.
I'd like to hear your take, TH. You obviously do not agree with my views on SWRs. But you also have obviously come to see that there is something in intercst's posting tactics that is not at all right. I am here to tell you that it would not be possible for you to imagine how deep the problem goes without having seen it play out in front of you. I saw it play out in front of me and I need to go back and check the Post Archives from time to time to assure myself that I am not crazy, that large numbers of people really did behave in so abominable a manner right out in public where a record was being kept which would be available for review by others for many years to come.
Consider the words that JWR1945 employs above to describe the tactics that have been used to block reasoned debate--"The Big Lie." I don't know how well you know JWR1945, but I think it is more than fair to say that he is not given to exaggeration and the making of wild claims. When JWR1945 says that someone is making use of Big Lie tactics, you can take that to the bank. It really is so.
What do we do?
My portfolio is comprised of three asset classes--TIPS and ibonds paying roughly a 3.5 percent real return and CDs which will be converted into long-term stock holdings when the valuation level for stocks falls to such a point that such purchases are consistent with my 4 percent annual take-out number. JWR1945, our resident Numbers Guy, says that the SWR for each of these asset classes is in excess of 4 percent. Thus, the plan appears to me to be a reasonably safe one.
In the "Yahoo Finance Quiz"Â thread at the Early Retirement Forum, I asked intercst his view as to whether my retirement plan is reasonably safe. He did not respond to the question.
I wanted to see what he would say on that forum, but the reality is that I knew his view on the question before I asked it. He has said hundreds of times in hundreds of different ways that there is zero chance that my plan will survive and that anyone who thinks that it is possible that this plan will survive is suffering from mental illness.
My guess is that these sound like extreme statements to you. If these statements were coming from someone other than intercst, they would not cause me much trouble in my effort to inform community members of the realities of SWRs. If these statements came forth from "Poster X," people would assume that "Poster X" is a nutcase. I could safely ignore the statements of "Poster X" and continue about the business of telling the story of the realities of SWRs.
Intercst is not "Poster X." He has a special status in these communities for three reasons. One is that he has been posting at them daily for five years now; he has lots of friends. Two is that he started the first board, the Motley Fool board, and is thus viewed by many as the founder of our little movement. Three is that he is the author of a study on SWRs that many community members have rightly found to be of great value and that has received endorsements from Scott Burns and others of similar stature.
When intercst says something re SWRs, community members listen. Most community members have not performed independent research on the questions we discuss at this board. They put their trust in fellow community members who have gained reputations as experts. Intercst is widely viewed as the ultimate expert on SWRs at the various FIRE/Passion Saving/Retire Early boards.
When intercst says that my plan is not a reasonably safe plan, he is engaging in deliberate deception. He is not making a mistake when he says that my plan cannot survive because I am invested 100 percent in "fixed-income" assets and his study proves that fixed-income assets can never support more than a 2.3 percent take-out number. He has been corrected on this point scores of times. Still, he continues to say it. I can provide you with any number of links supporting this assertion.
Learning is achieved through a building block process. The first step in learning how to read Shakespeare is learning the ABCs, If you skip that step and go directly to "King Lear," it will appear to you that the pages are filled with scribbles that have no meaning. You would be wrong in thinking this, but it would be understandable why you came to this conclusion if you did not possess the ability to put letters together into words and words together into sentences.
For community members to come to understand the realities of SWRs that are understood by me and JWR1945 and William Bernstein, we need to start by achieving a general consensus on the most basic factual questions. The question of whether my plan is a reasonably safe one is a basic factual question. We should all possess a good sense of the right answer to that question at this point, given how much time we have spent on this matter.
We don't. JWR1945 says in no uncertain terms that my plan is reasonably safe. Intercst says in no uncertain terms that my plan is not by any stretch of the imagination safe. It is not possible that both of these experts are telling us the truth on this question. One of them is engaging in deliberate deception. We need to figure out who, so that we can ask that person to kindly knock off the funny business and thereby permit the community to get about the task of advancing its understanding of the realities of SWRs.
I will tell you my suggestion for how to deal with the problem. I think that we need to take action as a community insisting that intercst play by the rules. All the rest of us know what the rules are and play by them in our discussions with fellow community members. Intercst is an out-of-control poster. He needs to be reined in. It needs to be a community project.
I have been asking for help with this matter for a long time. There have been occasions when particularly courageous community members have stepped forward and provided it. I will provide you with three examples so that you have a sense of why these efforts have not had the desired effect until now.
Here is a link to a post from the Motley Fool board put forward by BenSolar and titled "The hocus Plan: 4 Percent from 100 Percent Fixed-Income?"
http://boards.fool.com/Message.asp?mid= ... sort=whole
I provide below the full text of the post for the benefit of those who do not have access to the Motley Fool board:
intercst wrote: hocus has been telling us for a year now that you can reliably take a 4% withdrawal from a 100% fixed income portfolio.
"This type of BS has been the largest contributor to the circus-like atmosphere that has surrounded hocus for the last year. Intercst, of course, isn't the only one to make statements like this. In fact they come so fast and furious from so many different people that a casual reader would swear they are true.
From hocus' 'My Plan' post (http://boards.fool.com/Message.asp?mid=17246781 )
excerpt:
<<<
Investments:
1) TIPS at 3.5 percent in tax-protected accounts
2) ibonds at 3.4 percent in non-protected accounts (not taxed until cashed in)
3) Certificates of Deposit still held from pre-retirement days (and, thus, held at higher rates than those available today.). The CDs are being phased out as they come due into other investment classes. I expect to move a portion of the CD money into stocks. If stock prices came down, I would move it all into stocks.
Stock Allocation Goal: My goal is to get to a 50 percent stock allocation. I initially made the zero percent allocation to stocks for two reasons:
(1) I accumulated all of my retirement stash in a short amount of time. It was nine years from having zero in the bank to retirement date. So any stock purchases made in anticipation of retirement would not have been "for the long term." My worst nightmare was that, one year short of my retirement date, stocks would go into a downturn. I was not counting the months until retirement, I was counting the weeks. There was no way I wanted to take the risk of losses that could put off the retirement date for years.
(2) Stocks were at extreme levels of overvaluation at the time I began accumulating large sums for investment. I preferred to put money ultimately to be allocated for stocks into safe investment classes until stocks could be purchased at prices closer to average valuations. That way, I can purchase many more shares for the same portion of my retirement stash. Once I find reasonable purchase points, I intend to hold the stocks for the long term (no "timing" in and out of the market).
>>>
Not listed there, but mentioned elsewhere in the post is the fact that he owns his home. So real estate can be added to the list.
So he has TIPS and I-bonds and real estate. All are inflation protected assets that do not fit under the 'Fixed Income' category. He also has a plan to buy stocks when valuations are closer to average. Here's a news flash: they are still overvalued.
In my post 'The Hocus Plan: 2% SWR?? (http://boards.fool.com/Message.asp?mid=18200598 )
I examined the effects of a stock switching strategy similar to the one described by hocus. My conclusion: history backs hocus up, his valuation based switching strategy from 0% stocks to 50% stocks worked in the past, and in fact beat the static 'optimal allocation'.
Hocus is the only person I know (if only via message board) who has completely opted out of participation in the stock market bubble. And you know what? He has benefited immensely from doing so. So why can't the 10-15 people who like to spout the cr@p like the quote above just grow up and lay off the elementary school tactics?"
The post was recommended by 32 community members. That means that there was broad support for the proposal put forward by BenSolar that intercst knock off the "bs." You participated in the "Yahoo Finance Quiz" thread. So you can judge for yourself whether the "bs" continues until this day.
Here is a link to a post by JWR1945 titled "Blunt Words."
http://nofeeboards.com/boards/viewtopic.php?t=1191
"These words are very blunt, but necessary. I am confident that I could prove all of these assertions if I were required to do so. I would prefer not to, however, since it would be tedious and time consuming.
"Intercst engages in a big lie strategy. Repeated often enough and loud enough, people will eventually believe a big lie. There is no way to defend oneself against it. You have to refute it convincingly every time it comes up. Many people will believe a big lie simply because someone is so insistent upon bringing it up. They assume that there must be a basis in fact even when there isn't. That is why intercst will prevail...at least, for another few months.
"A person caught as the target of a big lie is frozen. Defending himself quickly consumes all of his time. He finds himself reacting to everything as if he were in a big lie environment. He simply does not have time to respond properly. He simply does not have enough time to discern honest comments from dishonest ones. As such, he assumes, because he has to assume, that people understand the full context and history behind a remark. They don't and that causes problems.
"Please keep the big lie off of these boards. When you import the Motley Fool into these boards, you import the big lie with it. It is OK to raise questions as a result of your visiting those boards. Just don't bring those words into our environment. The big lie is hidden in them. You may not recognize it. I assure you that it is in them.
"I find fault with hocus in this one thing and this one thing only: he has an intense love, an intense passion, for what the Motley Fool discussion boards could be. Sadly, they are something less."
I think it is fair to presume that you have gained a little insight into how the Big Lie game is played by benefit of your participation on the "Yahoo Finance Quiz" thread. The community was enjoying a great learning experience on that thread until Intercst poisoned it with dirty posting. I asked that he kindly knock off the funny business and in response he asked Dory36 to revoke my posting privileges. Dory36 did not go along with that request but he also did not admonish intercst for his use of dirty posting tactics to distract the discussions. The result is that a number of community members at the Early Retirement Forum now know that future SWR discussions held there are likely to be unpleasant ones.
That hurts me in my efforts to explain the realities of SWRs to fellow community members. The SWR issue is a complex one, and the realities that I am bringing to people's attention are not ones that they start out being particularly happy to find out about. Most community members are fair-minded and most see that there is at least some truth to the points that I have brought forward. But very few are willing to participate in threads containing the sort of ugliness you see revealing itself near the end of the "Yahoo Finance Quiz" thread. My chances of getting reasonable community members to participate in future SWR threads at that forum has been diminished.
Intercst gained something from the use of those tactics. He put off the day that people will gain an informed understanding of what the historical data says re SWRs. It is obvious to me that that is why he makes use of these sorts of tactics so regularly. He does not actually believe that I am a troll anymore than he believes that I am the man in the moon. He knows from long experience that if he claims that I am a troll, it is unlikely that he will suffer negative consequences for doing so, and that my reputation and thus my ability to make my case effectively will be diminished.
Community members often stop participating in SWR discussions when these tactics are employed. In many cases, they have done more than that--they have up and left the community. Here is a post from FoolMeOnce in which he explains to the Motley Fool community why his conscience required him to do just that, given the way that the SWR discussions were conducted at that board. This post obtained 54 recommendations from fellow community members.
http://boards.fool.com/Message.asp?mid= ... sort=whole
"This will be my last post here. Thanks to all that have engaged in constructive posts on this board over the years. This board has degenerated into something that I can no longer be proud to be involved with. Even some folks that I respect, have thrown in with a board culture that cannot tell the difference between witty repartee and childish personal attacks. I was the one that FA'd Galeno. His attempts to incite others to engage in personal attacks, with the tacit support of some on this board, was one of the final straws for me."
The poster he is referring to as offering tacit support is intercst. Galeno asked that community members seek me out and engage in acts of physical violence against me to stop me from offering my views on SWRs at the Motley Fool board. At one point, he put forward a death threat. Several hours after the posting of the death threat, I received the first e-mail in a series that I ultimately received from Motley Fool relating to the termination of my posting privileges there. My guess is that the reason why the first e-mail from Motley Fool came within hours of the posting of the death threat is that Motley Fool lawyers were concerned re potential liabilities that might follow from some crazy person taking action on the threat. Intercst offered no words in opposition to the threat. He implicitly endorsed it, telling fellow community members that in his view Galeno was offering better suggestions for how to bring the SWR discussions to resolution than any other community member.
Motley Fool site administrators told me throughout their communications with me that they greatly valued my contributions to the site. They never accused me of breaking a posting rule. They said that their strong preference was that discussion on all on-topic questions be permitted at the board. The explanation that they gave me in the e-mail telling me of termination of my posting privileges is that they had suffered the loss of too many community members during the Great SWR Debate.
This sort of thing should never happen. No community member should ever feel bound by conscience to leave a posting community because the level of discourse has reached so low a level as to be intolerable to decent civilized people. But that is what has happened when questions have been raised at the Motley Fool boards re the methodology used by intercst in his study of SWRs.
We have diminished ourselves in how we have handled this matter. If we insisted that intercst play by the same rules as everyone else plays by, I believe that he would do it. But he is not going to do it unless we insist. If he can continue to get away with throwing spitballs, he will continue throwing spitballs. He has found it to be an effective tactic.
There is a name that intercst uses to refer to the four posters who have been bold enough to challenge him either on the methodology used in his study or on the tactics he has employed to defend it. Me, JWR1945, BenSolar, and FoolMeOnce are commonly referred to as "The Four Dimwits."Â It is rare for any community member to challenge this designation; long timers know what consequences follow from doing so. Mikey put up a post during the "Yahoo Finance Quiz" thread that intercst viewed as favoring "the side" questioning his SWR views and Mikey was quickly deemed "the Fifth Dimwit."Â No response from the community. This is what regulars at that board have come to know as business as usual.
This sort of stuff is killing us, in my view. It is killing all of us, including intercst. The reality of things is that his study is a valuable piece of work. The dishonesty he employs in making claims about it on discussion boards is in the long run going to greatly diminish the perceived value of his contributions. He is destroying himself and he is destroying all the rest of us in the process. I believe that responsible community members need to step forward and do something.
I don't believe that people should be saying that they agree with my views on SWRs. Most do not, so it would be wrong for people to do that. What people should be doing is saying that the tactics that have been used to block reasoned debate are unacceptable and must come to a quick end. Anyone who uses the word "troll"Â as a debating tactic should be given a warning that that sort of nonsense will not be tolerated. Anyone who ignores the warning should be removed from the community. That's my take.
I'd like to hear your take, TH. You obviously do not agree with my views on SWRs. But you also have obviously come to see that there is something in intercst's posting tactics that is not at all right. I am here to tell you that it would not be possible for you to imagine how deep the problem goes without having seen it play out in front of you. I saw it play out in front of me and I need to go back and check the Post Archives from time to time to assure myself that I am not crazy, that large numbers of people really did behave in so abominable a manner right out in public where a record was being kept which would be available for review by others for many years to come.
Consider the words that JWR1945 employs above to describe the tactics that have been used to block reasoned debate--"The Big Lie." I don't know how well you know JWR1945, but I think it is more than fair to say that he is not given to exaggeration and the making of wild claims. When JWR1945 says that someone is making use of Big Lie tactics, you can take that to the bank. It really is so.
What do we do?