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Comment by Zetice | Hacker News Reader

If you can't smell the salesmanship taking place on this link, there is a whole lot more wrong with your filtering abilities than I had initially thought.

So based on this, I think you have a filter problem; you seem to be unable to accurately evaluate sources for their credibility, and take in any/all arguments without understanding how easy it is to be manipulated by un-credible sources into believing hard-to-disprove ideas that are nonetheless actively harmful to you and your ability to grow your investments.

This leaves you susceptible to charlatans and snake-oil salespeople, which fully explains your desire to believe proven-wrong ideas on investing. When you lose out on these market timing attempts, you apparently do so in a way that allows others to profit directly off of you, and you further advocate for others to follow suit.

You're a great mark, I'll give you that.

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We certainly have different types of filters. Your filter apparently catches blogs and that's fine. I feel I've been exposed to many interesting things on blogs. I'm sure others would agree.

Your model/filter may be better because you don't have to think about as many things. There's certainly more information out there than one has the ability to ingest. In my experience many things I thought were settled turned out not to be upon further inspection. A simple filter might be good enough for your purposes!

I think your ideas about investing can be correct (in that they produce favorable outcomes) and other ideas can be correct too.

Not a perfect analogy, but Newton's ideas about gravity are correct to explain a lot of things. Einstein's ideas expand and explain more. They are both correct, depending on the level of detail you need. Sometimes "correct" roughly equals "useful".

I didn’t filter your link because it was a blog, I filtered it because it was an obvious pitch for a product the authors sell.

Do you really not understand the issues there? Incredible.

It's a logical fallacy to assume what they are saying is false because they might stand to profit from it. They might be biased but can't we investigate their claims independently?

No, you can’t investigate their claims, as you are not a domain expert. They rely on you trying, however.

And it is not a logical fallacy to disregard their argument entirely. I didn’t say they were wrong, I said they weren’t credible.

I guess we'll have to disagree about whether I'm capable of investigating their claims. Maybe you aren't and that's well and good for you. If you cannot investigate their claims, I don't think there's much more to discuss on this topic.

Thanks for the lively discussion, Zetice!

Thank you for being a live demonstration to anyone left reading this of how fools and their money are soon parted.

Knowing your limits and knowing how bias creeps in are two skills you clearly lack. I hope nobody depends on you to make these kinds of decisions for them or in a way that impacts them.

For anyone left reading, let this be a live demonstration of how it can be a waste of time to try to convince someone on the Internet their thinking is wrong.

I'm pretty sure Zetice hasn't changed their mind on anything. I haven't really changed my mind on anything.

I still think the things we linked to are valuable. For those of you who have filters that let the information through, I hope you find something useful. Read the paper Zetice linked to and see what questions you come up with. Or don't.

If you value your safety, ignore every word this person has written. Their way of thinking leaves them extremely vulnerable.

You will be worse off if you think like they do.

Probably best to just ignore everything we've both said (including this advice). There haven't been any published and cited papers about this thread yet so it's too early to tell whether there's anything of value here.

There have absolutely been published and cited papers in this conversation (I cited one and then cited a book with literally hundreds more), the fact that you don't realize that should make it clear to anyone left reading this what's going on.

More examples of you assuming the worst about me. I'm well aware of what you posted.

My sarcasm didn't go through. I mean no one has written a published and cited paper about our conversation. Therefore no one should make any decisions based on our discussion.

It wasn't good sarcasm. There are published and highly cited papers people can read to learn more about what I am saying (and how what you're saying is nonsense).

I am stunned sometimes when I discover how completely unaware people are of how to apply critical thinking in the modern world. It's second nature to me, but conversations like these make it abundantly clear it's not a universal skill.

It's so interesting to me that your conclusion about me is that I'm not a critical thinker. If you knew me in real life you'd rank me among the most critical thinkers you know (or my whole life experience is wrong).

I think it speaks to the medium of communication we're using (you've misinterpreted things I've said as one problem with the medium), mixed with the topic being a very emotionally charged one.

You may think "critically" a great deal, but it's clear to me you don't know how to do it well, as source selection is a substantial part of successful analysis.

For example, you believe "whole life experience" is something worth noting, as if you have no clue whatsoever about how bad humans are at self evaluation.

Why wouldn't you know about that? What kind of "critical thinker" goes through life fully unaware of the impact that bias has on their ability to think critically?

A bad critical thinker wouldn't understand this concept.

A bad critical thinker would also not understand the value of avoiding sources from organizations misaligned to their incentives, because they'd know how powerful bad arguments can be, and their inherent limitations at recognizing them as a result of said bias.

I don't know you. But I do know how you've behaved in this conversation, and if you think this conversation is representative of your method of evaluating ideas and arguments, then yeah I would consider your critical thinking skills to be limited, regardless of how much you engage them.

I don't know you but I think you have categorized me as one of "them" (people who don't think critically) and have been arguing with me from that perspective.

I think you have a rigid idea of what the right idea is with investing and there's some resistance to anything that might challenge that. I understand why you'd feel that way. There's comfort in believing your filter and your method for gaining understanding of this complex world is totally correct. I find myself thinking that way sometimes too!

You're close, but meaningfully off (unsurprisingly).

I have categorized you as someone who has a substantially inflated sense of their capabilities, but when faced with any kind of challenge to that belief they wilt magnificently, usually in the form of, "That's just your opinion."

You discount the concept of bias as inapplicable to you for some reason, which more or less renders you incapable of meaningful critical analysis, yet you falsely think whatever remaining machinations you're capable of are useful.

You're trying to fly without any wings, declaring that you falling on your ass counts, and then refusing to even acknowledge the existence of gravity when its pointed out to you.

I may be entirely wrong about how personal finance works, this is possible and fine with me. What I'm not wrong about however, is your behavior. It's fundamentally and profoundly broken, if its purpose is to accurately predict future outcomes such as you claim it is.

It is your opinion that your filters and methods for discerning truth or value are correct. But you think they are the method. We disagree about the methods obviously.

Because we disagree you think there's something wrong with my critical thinking and that I'm unaware of biases. But are you aware of your own?

Typically what we criticize in others is what we fear about ourselves.

You have failed to successfully account for your bias in this conversation. This illustrates your limited skills as a critical thinker.

Who I am, what I stand for, does not matter. These are facts, and you'll either accept this reality or you won't.

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