stone wrote:
If there was a room full of people and you had to work out who amongst them were the PP holders, would you have any chance or working out who they were based on talking to them about other stuff or whatever?
As a nonbeliever when it comes to religion, sometimes I am surprised when I get to know a person and find out that s/he is religious. I hadn't seen it coming, and it usually turns out that religion was just something they were brought up with. Other times, I can pick it out. Some of my fellow unbelievers (unfairly) surmise that extremely religious people are unintelligent. I think that intelligence and religious beliefs can easily coinhabit the same mind. I cannot reliably predict who's going to be religious and who isn't.
Now, I know exactly why the pp appeals to me. I am not someone whom you 'd call a person with street smarts. I am slow to calculate, easily distracted when reading, and I have an unreliable short term memory. However, I have a pretty decent long term memory, perhaps strenthened by habitual journal writing. In spite of my lack of quick intelligence or, more likely, as a direct result of experiencing this lack, I think I have acquired wisdom. It's a kind of "slow intelligence." I know myself. Therefore, I take steps to mitigate the impact that a lack of street smarts often brings.
I put my key in the same pocket of my pants, always. (I think I learned this from the director of 'Memento'). I have to remind myself that people make mistakes when giving change, and I have to eyeball calculations on spreadsheets to see if something just doesn't look right, instead of accepting everything at face value. I have to remind myself not to be gullible, and so on. These things aren't effortless for me, but require constant discipline.
When it comes to figuring out the economy, my experience is -- pun intended -- a 'no brainer'. With humility comes wisdom and unfortunately this scarecrow can't go and see the Wizard to learn that he's intelligent after all. What I can do is latch on to something like the permanent portfolio that frees me from having to make smart, timely decisions. I think Medium Tex once referred to Cuggino of PRPFX as a mere train driver. Well, that's all any of us need to be to run a pp. Harry Browne has already designed a fine train.
I have faith in the pp. I know it works.
I don't think most pp'ers are like me at all. I think many of them are exceedingly good at mathematics, like fnord. I think they are far closer to understanding how the economy works -- I *am* working on that. I think that they are far more likely to discover something better than the permanent portfolio should it ever come along. A huge sea change, something like that which Browne foresaw when he wrote 'How You Can Profit from the Coming Devaluation.'
So, I'm fortunate to be able to read the thoughts of others here, but I definitely cannot tell how some of them came to adopt a strategy that requires very little smarts, something as tinker-free as the pp.
