John_Maxwell_IV comments on Financial Effectiveness Repository - Less Wrong

5 Post author: Gunnar_Zarncke 18 November 2014 09:57AM

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Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 19 November 2014 11:08:15AM 9 points [-]

As usual, people completely miss the point.

If you find that people consistently miss the point of what you're writing, you might consider working to improve your communication skills. For example, I've read this sentence several times and I'm still not sure how to parse it: "They just trend towards 'objects', as opposed to 'not'." I appreciate that you're trying to tell me what I might be doing wrong, but currently you aren't explaining yourself very clearly or convincingly, so I'm not sure if what you're saying is correct or valuable.

Comment author: gjm 19 November 2014 12:31:31PM 1 point [-]

I'm pretty sure the meaning of that sentence is: "The people I am describing are more interested in impersonal objects than in people, and cope better with impersonal objects than with people".

There may be some truth in that. But it's entirely unobvious why it should tell us anything about those people's competence to offer financial advice, and (despite SanguineEmpiricist's some-of-my-best-friends response) it's hard not to suspect an attempt to exploit the halo/horns effect. (Warning: link in previous sentence is to a RationalWiki page; RW isn't super-reliable in general but this page seems OK.)