RichardGibbons Posted June 9, 2021 Posted June 9, 2021 Yeah, that's exactly what I mean. Thanks, Cubsfan!
Gregmal Posted June 9, 2021 Posted June 9, 2021 @RichardGibbons, earlier you had mentioned that people who talked about the lab leak back in February of 2020 were rightfully outcast as conspiracy theorists? May I ask why you concluded that? There is and was a lot of circumstantial evidence supporting this. Whereas, can you tell me what facts there were at the time to support the notion that it came from bats at a wet market? Because I am not sure there were ANY at all, and the only things we relied on were sources who have turned out to be liars. I believe @hasilp89post was spot on. It was commendable in that he owned up and basically admitted, "yea I got fooled because I took some of these people and government folks at face value"....he also IMO hit the nail on the head in stating that basically the ONLY reason the lab leak theory was immediately dismissed, is because Trump said it, and everyone as a result immediately had to take the other side and became invested in discrediting it. Do you feel otherwise? While I can understand why someone like @jurgis is averse to these types of conversations, you've always come off as center left but intuitive and capable of seeing and applying fact and deducing what is likely. Why the knee jerk reaction to just label and dismiss such as in your post earlier today? What is the point in that? Is that not basically the root cause of what lead to this entire mess? People just slamming a label onto things they have an interest in manipulating and then the masses fall for it? If you just say "conspiracy theory", "far right/left", "Russian asset", you immediately and successfully condition people to ignore the content? Is that not dangerous? Do you not think there would have been significantly less confusion here if in February or March of 2020 there was a coordinated effect by these same folks to basically admit that hey, it is most likely this is a lab manipulated virus? All this same thought process and deductive reasoning skills are helpful in life as well as with investing. Should people just immediately write off investments because an analyst says its a sell? Its purported to be a pump and dump? Its a Portnoy REIT! or conversely just buy because so and so said its good? Of course not. So I dont understand why we wouldnt apply the same critical thinking lens to other areas of life as well.
RichardGibbons Posted June 9, 2021 Posted June 9, 2021 Greg, to not clutter up the thread with political discussions, I've responded to the political aspects through email. On the non-political stuff... I think it's pretty reasonable to write off things as "conspiracy theory", "far right/far left nut jobs", etc. because that's how one functions in the world. One only has so much time to make decisions in the world, so we mostly navigate the world through heuristics. If someone says something clearly false for ideological reasons fives times in a row, then the sixth time I'm going to spend basically no time evaluating their statement before dismissing it. Applying the critical thinking well takes effort and time, and we need to prioritize our resources. The cost of the critical thinking is high, the probability of the heuristic being wrong is low, and the cost when the heuristic is wrong is also low. So, as someone who owned a Portnoy REIT 20 years ago, I'm fine with writing off any Portnoy REIT off immediately. I have enough historical evidence that management is unlikely to be acting on behalf of shareholders, and I have more confidence in Portnoy's ability to screw shareholders than I do in my ability to identify a Portnoy REIT that won't end up screwing shareholders. Plus, there's thousands of non-Portnoy investments I could investigate instead. So, it doesn't make sense to me to spend any time whatsoever on a Portnoy REIT when I could instead spend that time on another investment.
Parsad Posted June 9, 2021 Posted June 9, 2021 Hi All, Please move this discussion over to the Coronavirus thread on the Politics Forum. Same username and password as the Investment Forum. https://politics.thecobf.com/topic/37583-coronavirus/?tab=comments#comment-1240380 Thanks! Sanjeev
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