Avoiding the golden mistake

[jducoeur]

Those who are nervous about the markets and contemplating pushing their money into gold might do well to take a look at yesterday's article in the Motley Fool. Suffice it to say, they make the point that, while gold tends to look good in the short run, it's generally a poor investment in the longer term. And most people are pretty bad at figuring out when the short term starts turning into the long.

Looking at it, it's pretty clear to me that gold is currently in the middle of a bubble, and getting steadily more over-valued. Piling out of one bubble into another is probably not the best strategy...

Comments

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

"How about *) an improvement in our formal education?"

IMAO, only if that *results* in "*) a substantial increase in our average speed of learning". Which is possible, but I think would require, at minimum, a massive revolution in teaching methods. I don't see us getting there incrementally from our current pedagogy.

"our instincts tell us to steal, cheat, lie, in some cases rape, and other things"

I think that's an over-simplification. The evolutionarily stable (mostly) mix is that most people are cooperatively social, but a few sociopaths exploit the system. I'm not sure that that has significantly changed. We may (maybe) have reduced the expression of sociopathy among low-power members of society, but high-powered sociopaths are as powerful and abusive as they have ever been.

[I have occasionally played around with an SF Utopia scenario based on the existence of an objective test for sociopathy. That invention leads to the *actual* War to End Wars, as all the sociopaths make their last attempts to maintain control. But once the cooperative societies are immune to infection by defaulters, they are hugely more productive, and can't be beaten in the long term. The end result is a society where severe sociopaths are isolated in asylums, and mild ones are prevented from occupying positions of power.]

[meiczyslaw.livejournal.com]

The evolutionarily stable (mostly) mix is that most people are cooperatively social, but a few sociopaths exploit the system.

Much of the current research reinforces this notion. Humans tend to generate a natural high when they help other people.

There are a couple of exceptions: for one, humans apparently really like vengence. We're willing to suffer a lot to get back at someone we think deserves it.

[jducoeur]

Well, it's a bit ambiguous whether that's an exception or not. The vengeance thing isn't necessarily helping other individuals, but it appears to be at least partly motivated by a desire to protect the tribe as a whole, by discouraging harm to it. (At least, that's the most plausible evolutionary-biology explanation I've seen.)

So it's arguably still altruistic, just in different ways...