Skeptics, Losers, Haters, etc.
On the importance of critical thinking
This is not an opinion piece.
By that sentence alone you should know that this is 100% an opinion piece. You should also know this is not ‘not an opinion piece’ by the fact that you, you digitally literate rockstar, wouldn’t dream of surfing to our little belt blog in the hopes of finding sage investing advice, would you? (Seriously, would you? My editors are actually asking.) And I’m not even certain I can call what I have written here ‘advice’ because it has come to my attention that advice is an awfully messy business.
On the one hand, everybody looks for advice at some point or another, all the time (market demand, check). On the other hand, there is ALWAYS going to be advice that directly contradicts OTHER advice (plentiful supply, also check). Can both pieces of advice be true? Can there be facts and also alternative facts? Or isn’t the dichotomy between fact and fiction?
Advice is admittedly a trickier business because there is very little objectivity to begin with; I mean at the basest level advice is just a suggestion, right? — If X happens you should do Y — But if another source tells you If X happens you should do Z, then what do you do? Which path do you take? Which advice wins out? Well, like information and misinformation, there are three main factors that determine which side you take you, or which you believe, regardless of whether it’s ‘true’ or not. (This is also trickier with advice because you only know the truth of it after the thing happens and you can see the results… but I digress.)
Factors:
1. How often you hear it
2. How aligned with your prior beliefs
3. How trusted the source
Oh boy, you can practically smell the social media echo chamber, can’t you?! This is the danger of only ever hearing one side of the story; of only hearing one opinion. With the internet, you can always find an applicable quote that you can use to justify your decisions. Prime example: YOLO! (Hint: however literally true, not good investing advice, as it turns out.) Social psychology studies notwithstanding, the real answer to the question of which advice usually wins out: whichever you choose to pay attention to. We’ve talked about attention here, you know what I mean.
So really, it comes down to whom you trust. To whom are you paying attention? Who is influencing you? When we only see things for 10 seconds as we scratch the itch to scroll ever deeper into a never-ending timeline, ‘trust’ has to do a lot of heavy lifting. Can you really believe anything you read on the internet? Read that sentence again. I am actually asking this.
Advice is a lot like a recommendation. And we usually seek it from somebody with experience of what we are currently going through, wisdom of the situation for which we are looking for guidance. Or, perhaps more often, we are simply looking for somebody else’s input so that the blame, if things should go south, doesn’t fall singularly on our shoulders. If nothing else, you’ll be able to commiserate with that other person from whom you got the shitty advice. (Whether or not they actually care about the aftermath is another story altogether.) Saul Bellow (a writer) had a famous quip about this aspect of guidance-seeking:
“When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.”
As perhaps is usually the case with these pieces, you might be asking what this is all about. And I’m about to show you what got me thinking! Look at this tweet:
It got a lot of attention on Sunday, during the NFL playoff games when people claim to be ‘watching football’ but are really just lying on couches with their phones checking DraftKings and scrolling Twitter.
You had half the ‘room’ calling out Rovell for unsubstantiated math, another half putting up prayer hands, and another half (math really is fun) saying such stupid stupid things you wonder why they’d want it on public record at all. This ‘cautionary tale’ from Darren Rovell begs you to disregard the enormous marketing contract Odell signed with CashApp to do this!; Disregard that the NFL almost certainly doesn’t pay contracts up front in one lump sum!; Disregard that Odell is probably collecting on a dollar cost average basis so a declining value of BTC would actually mean he’s getting paid more of it week over week (somebody check me, please)! The ‘cautionary tale’ according to Darren Rovell is, ultimately, hey everybody, Bitcoin is volatile! When it goes down people lose money!
I, for one, fail to see how that is news. Anybody involved with crypto or markets in any capacity knows that they are volatile, crypto in particular. In a lot of ways, very akin to sports (and gambling), the highs and lows are why we play the game! If you are intelligent, you know that there is significant risk with investing (gambling) of any kind; but, with great risk, comes the potential for to-the-moon reward. That is the game. It has always been the game.
The point here is that you can spin your hand-picked ‘facts’ into whatever story fits the narrative you are trying to tell. It’s safe to say Rovell is a BTC #hater, and he has some decent, or at least justifiable, reasons for being one. When asked if he would make the same post if BTC had “climbed through the roof” (a very different narrative, obviously) Rovell admitted, in a tweet, that he’s “really concerned about crypto, the percentage that the youth of America have in it, how it doesn’t make much sense, and the potential consequences ahead.” The last bit about ‘potential consequences ahead’ could be said about literally anything.
But fine! Even if those are totally fair, honest, good points we should all consider… those are his personal feelings on the matter. Does that mean they should be yours, as well? To me it sounds like somebody who hasn’t done any sustained critical thinking / research into the thing he’s trying to talk bad about? I mean, does anybody actually know ‘the percentage the youth of America have in crypto’? Where would Rovell have learned that? And how much disposable income do the youth of America have anyway for middle-aged men to be concerned about how balanced their portfolio is? If Darren knew anything about fiat currency (a category to which all currency belongs), cryptocurrency does make sense, because they are based on social acceptance and trust that these things, whatever they are (gold nuggets, silver coins, green paper with people’s faces on it, or bits on a computer), have value.
Darren Rovell is a crypto skeptic, fine. The hater, as they say, is gonna hate.
But unless a Twitter user pauses a moment to think a bit more critically about the story, he/she will scroll to the next thing with the (distant, fleeting) notion that converting cash to crypto is irrevocably bad. Other haters will retweet Rovell— look, Odell, only made $35,700 of what should have been a $750,000 payment — because the numbers are misleading, and then even more people will see it and be influenced by it. And then they’re on to the next thing before they’ve even really grasped anything resembling nuance, or the financial logistics of how NFL players are actually paid out on the contracts that they hear about on Twitter.
And yes, of course, somebody long on BTC would probably only be tweeting things that fit their narrative that the cryptocurrency is a smart investment and a good financial decision and the opportunity of a lifetime to get in on a $36,000 ground floor (lol). That’s their prerogative, too! Just don’t be dishonest about it.
Perhaps none of this needed to be said out loud. Because this is why you follow a complex variety of people on Twitter! And hopefully the various people you follow have various backgrounds and various opinions and various ADVICE. Baskets and eggs, as the saying goes! You need differing perspectives; you need counter-arguments; you need alternate theories. That is the best advice money can buy: go get more of it.
That is, until somebody reminds you that there is such thing as too much of a good thing; that having MORE information is a great thing until you have way too much of it… and then you can’t manage it, or you succumb to analysis paralysis. And then somebody will try to sell you data-management software. This is the game!
In a world with more and more information at the beck and call of quick fingertips and fiberoptic cable lines, you have access to more advice than anybody in human history. Do you trust any of it, when everybody else is looking for an edge? Do you trust it, when everybody else has skin in this game as well? How can you know anybody else is really on your team? How can you really know if what somebody else says is good advice and not deliberate misdirection?
I humbly submit that you’ll know when you know, and then you’ll be proven wrong, and only then will you know.
We’ve heard from one writer on the matter, how about another? This time, Philip Larkin (poet):
It speaks; I hear; others may hear as well,
But not for me, nor I for them; and so
With happiness. Therefore I stay outside,
Believing this; and they maul to and fro,
Believing that; and both are satisfied,
If no one has misjudged himself. Or lied.
This is not an opinion piece.
