REHP obsession

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raddr
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REHP obsession

Post by raddr »

It only took a few hours for one of the obsessed posters at the REHP to pounce on this topic: http://boards.fool.com/Message.asp?mid=19073659

Those people need to get a life. :lol:
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ataloss
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Post by ataloss »

Is this because TMF, home of the Dumb Four (or whatever they called it) now finds the 4% rule to be unquestionable?

What led to this action? Was it the will of board members there?

why was this posted there?:
Ding Dong! The Witch is dead. Which old Witch? The Wicked Witch!
Ding Dong! The Wicked Witch is dead.
Wake up - sleepy head, rub your eyes, get out of bed.
Wake up, the Wicked Witch is dead. She's gone where the goblins go,
Below - below - below. Yo-ho, let's open up and sing and ring the bells out.
Ding Dong' the merry-oh, sing it high, sing it low.
Let them know
The Wicked Witch is dead!


Why does there seem to be glee over the banning? Are we to believe that these people are all opponents of "honest and inormed posting"?


ataloss
treading on thin ice with a free membership there :)
Last edited by ataloss on Mon Nov 22, 2004 8:19 am, edited 2 times in total.
Have fun.

Ataloss
JWR1945
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Post by JWR1945 »

They have been obsessed with hocus forever. He is their main draw. Whenever he has wanted to leave for a while, they have launched a steady barrage of gratuitous ridicule posts to bait him to come back in.

The Retire Early Home Page has a distinct lack of original ideas. There have been a few exceptions. Those posters are over here.

Have fun.

John R.
hocus
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Post by hocus »

Whenever he has wanted to leave for a while, they have launched a steady barrage of gratuitous ridicule posts to bait him to come back in.

And a certain someone always obliged them and went for the bait, didn't he?

The thing is, I love this medium. I wrote for years about taxes and politics for the print medium. But I feel like I was born for the back and forth of discussion boards. Even when the back and forth is dumb and mean-spirited, I sort of like it. I imagine a reader who sees through the nonsense, and I communicate with that person, and it seems worth it to explore the dumb and mean-spirited comments in depth.

What I like most is that, when you tap into a discussion board debate, it is not just the content that you are taking in. You take in the process by which the content is explored, and that adds a fascinating dimension. And you take in the human element. Many of the people who didn't like what I was saying just don't like the idea that the safe withdrawal rate is not always 4 percent. They want intercst to be right, and they don't want anyone to post things saying different. End of story, so far as they are concerned.

I like that about the medium. With a magazine article, you just get the finished product to look at, the result of all the research and interviews and so forth. With boards, you see the interviews, you see the research efforts, you see the intiial human reactions. It's got more life, more blood.

There must be reasonable enforcement of reasonable rules, or the whole thing breaks down. I hope that people figure that out so that the medium achieves its potential. I very much agree with ataloss's comment above that Motley Fool has in essence declared that the 4 percent SWR cannot be questioned at its site. It's not "jackboot censorship" by a long stretch, but it is a form of censorship.

When you tilt the playing field so far to one side, you ruin the fun of it. That's my real criticism of what happened. Intercst took the fun out of the REHP board, and Motley Fool went a long ways toward taking the fun out of the site. The idea is for the community to work these things out by itself, and pushing the delete button on one side of the debate means that the matter can never be brought to satisfactory resolution. At least not at that board, and that's the place where it should have been brought to resolution since that's the place where it started.

I can now add to my list of accomplishments "banned at Motley Fool!" It's not easy being banned at Motley Fool, you know. Do you know anyone else who it has happened to? I don't. You have to do something special to be banned at Motley Fool.

I'm thinking that the bottom line on this is that the issue of safe withdrawal rates has become a sort of third-rail issue in the field of personal finance. On the surface, it seems boring--spreadsheets and numbers and such. But the implications of SWR analysis really send people.

You can't lay this at one person's feet. Intercst obviously did all he could to achieve a result along these lines, but he couldn't have done it without a lot of help. Most people are not evil, so why did so many help? I think that the idea that the SWR for stocks is in some circumstances so much lower than people once thought makes people extremely uncomfortable. I think that a background issue with this thing is that ideas that gained easy acceptance during the bull market are now being subjected to scrutiny, and people are going to need to reorient their thinking on some investment issues a bit. It doesn't by any stretch mean that stocks are a bad investment class. But I believe that our thinking on how the various investment classes work will be reexamined as we move into a new investing climate.

People are trying to come to terms with some things but are anxious about doing so, and The Great Debate splashed cold water on them and forced them to take a look at something they are not ready to look at yet. The good side of the discussion board medium is that it permits you to watch this sort of thing play out. The bad side is that, unless the medium's power is harnessed by way of reasonable enforcement of reasonable rules, the emotional aspects of a debate get so out of control that they overwhelm the rational side and shut down the learning process.

It was an adventure. A long adventure. I learned a few things about investing. I learned a few things about people. You take that in and you cross one item off of your Daily Things to Do list, thereby opening up time for some new adventure in which perhaps you can learn something else altogether.
wanderer
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Post by wanderer »

What happened at the MOOTFL board that the macaroon -like arrete referred to?
regards,

wanderer

The field has eyes / the wood has ears / I will see / be silent and hear
hocus
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Post by hocus »

What happened at the MOOTFL board

There was a thread at the REHP board recently at which AliFool was subjected to some attacks for the way she and her husband live their lives. There was a thread at the Moving Out of the Fast Lane (MOOTFL) board in which questions were raised as to why the REHP board responded so strangely in the earlier thread.

I commented that I thought that the way the board is run played a role. I did not bring up SWRs or the smear campaign, and I did not refer to intercst by name. I said that the board had become unbalanced over time as the more responsible people gave up on it. My point was that responsible ccommunity members need to get involved if they want to preserve a board as a useuful learning resource.

MsPoppy then injected the smears that have become commonplace as part of the SWR debate. She said that I was only saying these things because I had some sort of personal animus against intercst, and that I post too long, and I don't remember what else.

I responded that I did not think it appropriate to discuss the SWR matter at the MOOTFL board, but that I did feel a need to respond to the smears that MsPoppy put forward. Some others then objected that somehow it was me who had brought the ugliness to the MOOTFL board. The idea here is that it is not the person engaging in a smear who is speading the ugliness, it is the person at whom the smear is directed that is causing the trouble.

The purpose of a smear is to intimidate. I do not think that it is a good thing for posters who are smeared to say nothing. I think that you need to refrain from putting up attacks in response. But I also think that you need to identify the smear and correct the record. Otherwise the smear achieves its intended effect of silencing some members of the community and confusing others.

The e-mail I received from Motley Fool gave the drop in participation at the REHP board as the first "reason" for my termination from the site. There was a reference to the MOOTFL matter, but it seemed based on the same logic as had been raised in one of the smears put forward there--that somehow I am responsible for the ugliness spreading if I ever comment on an attack someone makes on me to silence me. There was no claim that I had broken any rules in the posts I put forward, and none of the posts have been removed.

I doubt that the MOOTFL thing was the driving force behind the termination decision. It appears to have been the precipitating act. But my presumption is that it would have been something else had that development not come along.

The e-mail also mentioned posts in which I have indicated that The Great Debate might not be resolved until the end of 2004. The idea here seems to be that there should be some sort of time limit on how long the board has to devote to a discussion.

I think that's silly. I obviously would prefer that the matter be resolved more quickly. But no one can dictate a time schedule to a board. The board does what it wants when it wants. Intercst has been putting forward his views on SWRs for four years now. All of a sudden it's a problem if someone else is going to be putting forward his for another 18 months?

The real cause is that Motley Fool does not like the effect that this matter has had on the community. That's what I believe and that is the first reason given in the e-mail. The proper solution would be to enforce the published rules, which were written to deal with just this sort of situation and for the purpose of avoiding this sort of negative effect on the community. The interesting question is, Why is Motley Fool so reluctant to enforce its own rules that it would ban a longtime poster rather than enforce them?
hocus
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Post by hocus »

They have been obsessed with hocus forever. He is their main draw. ...The Retire Early Home Page has a distinct lack of original ideas.

This is the driving force of everything that has happened. If intercst had been able to put another issue on the table with enough staying power to cause people to lose interest in The Great Debate, he could have killed the discussion that way. He doesn't have any fresh on-topic ideas. So the board's attention always returned to SWRs.

My posts on this matter had impact, there is no question about that. In ordinary circumstances, it is considered a good thing for a discussion board post to have impact. What made this case different?

It's the ugliness that was injected into the proceedings. That is what ruined it for everyone involved. And 100 percent of the ugliness was injected by the other side. I never put forward a single attack post.

One claim I made that can be considered negative is the claim that intercst engaged in deception to defend his SWR claims. But there was no possible way to make an effective argument without making and proving that claim. His entire defense of his claims was rooted in deception, almost from the beginning. He never offered a reasoned defense, it was always the deception card that he relied on to score points.

I needed to point that out because the very fact that he relied on deception so heavily tells the story that needs to be told. If he possessed confidence in his claims, he would have gone another route.

Has he gone another route, the entire debate would have been a wonderful thing. There was huge interest, so it would have brought the board alive. It would have returned the focus to on-topic debate for the first time in a long time. That was my purpose in putting up the first post, and it is clear that it would have been achieved had intercst either not gone down the road he did or had Motley Fool taken steps to stop him from doing so.

The hardest part of the whole thing to accept is how close we came to doing something really good for the board. It was a chance for the board to update and redefine itself. It could have all been every exciting and uplifting and constructive.
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