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Originally Posted by Aaron W.
Maybe, maybe not. Again, I reject the idea that a "friend in financial services" is automatically qualification for why you should trust them with advice regarding your credit score. Financial services is a broad industry, and it's not always evident that what they're doing is related to the thing you're actually needing.
So instead of, for instance, asking me exactly what capacity my friend works in what financial industry, your advice is to not trust him? (FTR, not going to answer the question - I just noted with some irony that you didn't seem to care.)
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And the fact that I don't know authors personally is pretty irrelevant to me. I work in a world where our best information comes from strangers all the time (academia). What I look for is data and evidence, not just "my friend told me..."
If you truly believed this, you'd point out that my friends - who are strangers to you - would be of equal stature to strangers, not worse.
Like if my friend made a webpage, would you suddenly believe him?
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Meh -- I don't claim to have *ANY* serious background in blackjack. So that I wouldn't immediately see something in that only shows that I'm somewhat ignorant when it comes to blackjack. Though the situation where insurance is -EV and bet sizes are relatively large isn't about opacity as much as it is about rarity.
You have some serious background in poker, no? You couldn't think of a situation in poker where you'd rather lock up a certain win at EV- over gambling for more?
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I'm sure that there's *somebody* out there for which whole life insurance is the right decision. That doesn't mean that advising people away from whole life insurance is bad advice.
It is bad advice if you've ignored the Bayesnian priors on whether it might be the right decision.
For example, if someone stopped you on the street and asked you whether they should buy whole life insurance, answering it's a bad idea is good advice. You have zero priors.
If your friend asked you the same question and you used the samr priors to formulate a response, you're a bad friend.
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And your ability to accurately portray my argument shows more about your desire to prove yourself right more than it is a meaningful argument against the position that I've put forward.
Your position is ignorant, in the sense that you are deliberately limiting your information. It's the equivalent of answering a poker question with, "you should quit poker, 90% of players lose money outright and 90% of players who win money would have had more had they done something else."
The statement is factually true, but if you answered every question with that statement you'd be unhelpful.