Public Service Announcement Collection

Eliezer Yudkowsky

P/S/A: There are single sentences which can create life-changing amounts of difference.

P/S/A: If you're not sure whether or not you've ever had an orgasm, it means you haven't had one, a condition known as primary anorgasmia which is 90% treatable by cognitive-behavioral therapy.
P/S/A: The people telling you to expect above-trend inflation when the Federal Reserve started printing money a few years back, disagreed with the market forecasts, disagreed with standard economics, turned out to be actually wrong in reality, and were wrong for reasonably fundamental reasons so don't buy gold when they tell you to.
P/S/A: There are many many more submissive/masochistic men in the world than there are dominant/sadistic women, so if you are a woman who feels a strong temptation to command men and inflict pain on them, and you want a large harem of men serving your every need, it will suffice to state this fact anywhere on the Internet and you will have fifty applications by the next morning.
P/S/A: Most of the personal-finance-advice industry is parasitic and/or self-deluded, and it's generally agreed on by economic theory and experimental measurement that an index fund will deliver the best returns you can get without huge amounts of effort.
P/S/A: If you are smart and underemployed, you can very quickly check to see if you are a natural computer programmer by pulling up a page of Python source code and seeing whether it looks like it makes natural sense, and if this is the case you can teach yourself to program very quickly and get a much higher-paying job even without formal credentials.

P/S/A: There are single sentences which can create life-changing amounts of difference.

P/S/A: If you're not sure whether or not you've ever had an orgasm, it means you haven't had one, a condition known as primary anorgasmia which is 90% treatable by cognitive-behavioral therapy.
P/S/A: The people telling you to expect above-trend inflation when the Federal Reserve started printing money a few years back, disagreed with the market forecasts, disagreed with standard economics, turned out to be actually wrong in reality, and were wrong for reasonably fundamental reasons so don't buy gold when they tell you to.
P/S/A: There are many many more submissive/masochistic men in the world than there are dominant/sadistic women, so if you are a woman who feels a strong temptation to command men and inflict pain on them, and you want a large harem of men serving your every need, it will suffice to state this fact anywhere on the Internet and you will have fifty applications by the next morning.
P/S/A: Most of the personal-finance-advice industry is parasitic and/or self-deluded, and it's generally agreed on by economic theory and experimental measurement that an index fund will deliver the best returns you can get without huge amounts of effort.
P/S/A: If you are smart and underemployed, you can very quickly check to see if you are a natural computer programmer by pulling up a page of Python source code and seeing whether it looks like it makes natural sense, and if this is the case you can teach yourself to program very quickly and get a much higher-paying job even without formal credentials.

We seem to have a baseline disconnect with respect to how one goes about picking what to invest in, so I'll let the subject drop and not get into line-by-line argument.

However let's take a look at the broader claim "treating finance as hard is a mistake".

It looks to me like there are two sorts of people that consistently do well in personal finance

Um, evidence? It does not look to me like that, so where's the data?

The "finance is impossible" group is better known as passive long-only investors. They don't get "average" return on capital in any meaningful sense of the word "average" -- they are just willing to accept whatever returns the basket of assets (index) they chose will generate. And they still have to make decisions -- very meaningful decisions -- about which index to pick and how much leverage to deploy.

The "finance is easy" group is usually called value investors. Note that they are active investors, not passive. Given this I am not sure why do you think they consistently do well -- this seems to contradict your acceptance of EMH earlier. And, of course, "pricing assets" is very very hard.

It's not clear to me what advice you're giving with the statement "Finance is hard."

The advice is: there are no good one-size-fits-all solutions. Investments should be custom-tailored to individual circumstances which include things like risk tolerance, expected use, expected time horizon, etc. That custom-tailoring is complex and there are no obvious ways to make it simple. Simple solutions exist but are typically sub-optimal. Generic advice (other than "don't fall for scams") is pretty worthless.

Um, evidence? It does not look to me like that, so where's the data?

Who do you think consistently does well, and what data do you use to support that view? That'll help me determine if I have evidence you'll find convincing.

They don't get "average" return on capital in any meaningful sense of the word "average"

Similarly, what does "average" mean to you?

Given this I am not sure why do you think they consistently do well -- this seems to contradict your acceptance of EMH earlier.

I said earlier:

The EMH has holes; Buf

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