See also the contrarianism sequence https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/contrarianism . There are PLENTY of topics where mainstream consensus is serving different purposes (social cohesion, status for elites, arbitrage opportunities for the well-connected, compliance encouragement for the proles, etc.) than you have for the questions they appear to be answering.
For pure financial speculation, the EMH does hold, but only in aggregate over fairly long time periods. The short-seller’s adage applies to almost everything else: the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay liquid.
I fully support your advice, but would like to add that you probably can’t spend that much time/energy on every topic—you have to decide what things are worth understanding deeply enough to know whether to disagree with the common wisdom.
Even for financial speculation, this is possible. For example, after Black Thursday, the bankers bought lots of stock to increase the price because they wanted to avoid a larger crash that affected their companies predicting other people would follow suit if they made the “prediction” that the market would go back up.
See also the contrarianism sequence https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/contrarianism . There are PLENTY of topics where mainstream consensus is serving different purposes (social cohesion, status for elites, arbitrage opportunities for the well-connected, compliance encouragement for the proles, etc.) than you have for the questions they appear to be answering.
For pure financial speculation, the EMH does hold, but only in aggregate over fairly long time periods. The short-seller’s adage applies to almost everything else: the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay liquid.
I fully support your advice, but would like to add that you probably can’t spend that much time/energy on every topic—you have to decide what things are worth understanding deeply enough to know whether to disagree with the common wisdom.
Even for financial speculation, this is possible. For example, after Black Thursday, the bankers bought lots of stock to increase the price because they wanted to avoid a larger crash that affected their companies predicting other people would follow suit if they made the “prediction” that the market would go back up.
Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_Crash_of_1929#:~:text=Whitney%20placed%20a%20bid%20to%20purchase%2025%2C000%20shares%20of%20U.S.%20Steel%20at%20%24205%20per%20share%2C%20a%20price%20well%20above%20the%20current%20market.