“Constructive Skepticism” Volume 2 – Handbook #IV: The Template for Reading Research Papers – Understanding What Readers Say
For new readers: Please read the “Pinned Post” at the top of this Substack’s Home Page, and titled Why Use Public Peer-Review to Write a Book? - “See for Yourself”.
For returning readers & subscribers: This second post in a series of three posts connects new dots with last week’s post as part of a process to understand its readers: What do readers do, say, and read? This post focuses on what readers say.
Dealing with the Iceberg of Bad Papers that Sank Meaningful Innovations
As mentioned in the first post in this series of three posts, the first half of 2024 saw the tip of an iceberg break through the surface of mainstream consciousness. The Wall Street Journal article of 5/14/24, and the Nature article of 1/3/23 highlighted the existential need for reading research from the perspective of the “Constructive Skepticism” curriculum in order to “See for Yourself” what valuable innovations may hide in a sea of random noise, “Willful Ignorance, Error & Deceit”. Innovation starts with individuals, innovative institutions empower innovative individuals, and CTRI’s “Constructive Skepticism” curriculum in general, and the Template for Reading Research Papers in particular focus on asking good questions in order to get good innovative answers.
https://www.amazon.com/CTRIs-Template-Reading-Research-Papers/dp/B0D2WBP7L1?ref_=ast_author_mpb
Why is it Hard to “See for Yourself”, and Easy to be Fooled?
The short answer: “Spinach” - a “Constructive Skepticism” code-word for “Things we think unquestionably true but look ambiguously false after asking a few questions”. For details about the meaning of “Spinach”, see “Constructive Skepticism” – Volume 3 – Notebook #1: Model Risk in Retirement Planning, Chapter 1: “Spinach”.
https://francoisgadenne.substack.com/p/constructive-skepticism-volume-3
Initially, we hoped that “Spinach” remained rare in Health, Wealth, and Statistics research papers. Then we realized that is the default condition. Thus, these fields of inquiry have a structural tilt in favor of asking constructively skeptical questions to sort out the rare signals from a sea of noisy papers.
Further, “Spinach” becomes an existential problem in retirement because the time to recover from “Willful Ignorance, Error & Deceit” dwindles with every passing moment, and every passing year. Retirement planning deals with a logical succession of absorbing barriers in a limited amount of time because retirement quickly becomes a story of things breaking down over a period of time, and the value of getting things right increases as the time horizon decreases.
As a reader and writer about retirement, the value of having lived in retirement for a few years comes from the direct experience of these absorbing barriers, and their matching discontinuities. Combine this direct experience of retirement issues with having the time to read the “TL;DR” (Too Long; Did not Read) papers, and to mull over what the researchers say, you start to hear the signals through the noise. One of these signals reveals the question that a retirement plan answers based on how it starts: Does it start from the investment portfolio, or does it start from a retirement budget?
Using the concept of “Form” introduced in “Constructive Skepticism”: Volume 3 – Notebook #I: Model Risk in Retirement Planning – Chapter 7 (Part A & B) as well as Appendix A, one can think of a retirement planning “Form” as a repeatable sequence of analytical steps that can be applied consistently to different clients. For instance, a retirement planning “Form” that would include the client’s budget, the household balance sheet, and the optimization of an investment portfolio could look like this:
- Document the client’s current annual budget
- Estimate the client’s retirement horizon
- Develop projections of the evolution of the client’s line-item budget over the remaining life horizon
- Use the net-present-value of the projections, and current market value of the investment portfolio to present a current household balance sheet
- Use Risk Capacity from the current household balance sheet to develop the Client’s Risk Management Techniques Allocations
- Map the location of asset types, and investment accounts against the Client’s Risk Management Techniques Allocations
- Optimize Investment Asset Allocations to the Client’s Risk Management Techniques Allocations, to the Client’s Risk Capacity, or to some other benchmark measure.
- Develop the Buy/Sell Matrix of Product Selections by Account Location, and by Risk Management Techniques Allocations with sub-Asset Allocations, or by portfolio Asset Allocations
- Repeat annually, or whenever a significant change takes place in the life of the client
Plans from the school of Expected Value Optimization answer questions related to the bottom of this “Form”. Plans from the school of Client-Centric Planning answer questions related to the top of this “Form”. Recent developments such as Blanchett (2022), and Idzorek/Kaplan (2024) suggest that the twain may meet in the middle with the help of the Household Balance Sheet as the gathering place of questions asked implicitly, or explicitly.
Based on personal experience, the household balance sheet provides a presentation device that clients understand intuitively. Thus, the household balance sheet enables productive side-by-side comparisons of the analytical differences, degrees of completeness, and practical relevance between a retirement plan based on ensemble averages and a retirement plan based on the client’s individual clinical ambiguity. These comparisons highlight the presence of tradeoffs between the ensemble optimization of a retirement model, and the individual discontinuities of a client’s retirement experience. The questions individuals ask of a retirement plan tend to deal with the continuities they seek, and the discontinuities that they fear.
In this vein, and in his 1980 book titled “Death and Existence, A Conceptual History of Human Mortality”, James P. Carse’s articulation of continuity and discontinuity shows that we seek the comfort of continuity, grieve the disruption of continuity in the presence of a discontinuity (e.g. a death), and fear the discomfort (i.e. the freedom) that it takes to create a new continuity in the wake of the discontinuity. Carse’s model of old continuity/discontinuity/new continuity shows that freedom expresses itself as a choice experienced in a flow lived in the presence of absorbing barriers. Freedom presents itself as a choice that we have when we experience discontinuities.
Carse’s pattern of continuity, discontinuity, and having a choice to grieve in the past continuity, or to establish a new continuity takes place on a scale that ranges from the domestic to the academic. We experience this pattern in everyday life such as living with an old dog, the death of the old dog, and continuing life with a new dog. We know this pattern intellectually in academic forms such as “Thesis, Anti-thesis, and Synthesis”.
Carse goes on to document several historical ways to conceptualize discontinuities, and to deal with renewed continuities. These includes the ways of Plato, Aristotle, Freud, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Jung, Teilhard de Chardin, Hegel, Sartre, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard. Working with retirement planning clients, one can expect to encounter a sampling of such foundational ways that differ from one’s own, thus different client expectations, reactions, and decisions to the features of a plan.
On the other hand, seeing a common thread from Aristotle, to the Declaration of Independence, we read that humans have a yearning for happiness in the continuity of the life that they seek to live. However, like the wandering hero in The Odyssey, in our search for happiness we can fall for the “Sirens’ Song” of “Willful Ignorance, Error & Deceit”. Thus, “Spinach” becomes a structural feature of life, and of research papers instead of an exception because we fear discontinuities, we want to stay happy, and one can decide not to embrace a new continuity.
Thus, each generation brings up with it a number of promoters, from the well-intended to the ill-intended, offering new and improved boundaries that promise happiness from easier choices. In the end, it boils down to control. As a soccer-savvy friend used to say: “Qui a les clefs du camion? (“Who has the keys to the truck?”). If you don’t “See for Yourself”, somebody else will do the seeing for you, and you may not like where the “Truck” is going.
“See for Yourself” Where the “Puck” is Going
This post comes to a close by moving from the earlier French sport analogy of control based on the ownership of the keys to the “Truck” to the American sport analogy of innovation based on the direction of the “Puck”. Starting in 2005 at the Retirement Income Industry Association (RIIA), the lived experience of retirement by advisors and their clients led to the development of the Household Balance Sheet, Risk Capacity, and the Risk Management Techniques Allocations. In 2010, Mike Zwecher summarized many of these ideas in a book titled “Retirement Portfolios, Theory, Construction, and Management” as well as a matching Workbook. The next series of posts will review Zwecher’s books to set the historical, conceptual, and “Form” context for the reviews of Pfau (2024), Blanchett (2022), and Idzorek/Kaplan (2024) introduced in earlier posts.
Additionally, and since 2010, new research programs have created meaningful discontinuities in financial and retirement planning theory. These include Ole Peters’ Ergodicity Economics, and Gerd Gigerenzer’s “Fast & Frugal” Heuristics Program. One can grieve in the old continuity, or decide to embrace the growth that comes with these new continuities. Future posts will describe their impacts on the discontinuities, and new continuities of retirement planning.
In the meantime, this series of three posts reaches out to readers to develop good questions about what they do, what they say, and what they read. We seek to understand where the “Puck” is going from the “Perspective” of the readers. This final part of the post presents two questions to listen to what readers say, so that we can edit them together before we use them up in surveys on Substack, and LinkedIn.
Sample Question about Saying #1: What do you say when asked how you form a personal opinion in order to make individual, business, or investment decisions?
- Looking at Marshall McLuhan’s “Hot Media” that he defines as having low audience participation, thus requiring no effort to fill in missing things with their high-definition material, resulting in uniformity, ensemble averages, and centralization:
o I watch TV, cable, movies, ads, et al.
o I listen to the Radio, ads, et al.
o I scroll Social-Media such at Facebook, TikTok, et al.
o I watch YouTube videos, et al.
o I get answers to questions from Voice Assistants such as Siri, Alexa, et al.
o I get answers to questions from LLMs such as GPT, Claude, et al.
o I listen to Podcasts
o I attend lectures, courses, conferences, and training programs
o I read newspapers, magazines, blogs, et al.
o Other (please specify): ________
- Looking at Marshall McLuhan’s “Cold Media” that he defines as having high audience participation, thus requiring effort to fill in missing things with their low-definition material, resulting in unicity, innovations, and decentralization:
o I turn questions into LLM prompts as a form of Search
o I search the Internet with Search Engines
o I talk to colleagues, neighbors, and mentors
o I read and write e-mails
o I analyze research papers
o I post on platform such as Medium, LinkedIn, Substack, et al.
o Other (please specify): ________
Sample Question about Saying #2: What types of questions do you ask when you need to form a personal opinion about research results in order to make individual, business, or investment decisions? Do you ask questions about the:
o “Perspective” of the author(s)?
o “Domains of Knowledge” that characterize the research?
o “Historical Lineage” that sets the context of the research?
o “Purpose” of the author(s)/paper?
o Choice of study “Methodology” that defines the paper?
o Choice of quantitative “Methods” used in the paper?
o “Axioms, Assumptions & Hypotheses” that limit the validity of the results of the paper?
o “Statistical Meaning” of the results?
o “Practical Meaning” of the research?
- None of the above?
- Other? (please specify): ________
Looking forward to your thoughts, as I wonder how, and with whom the “Puck” is moving from “Trust Them” because they have the keys to the “Truck”, to “Show Me” based on “Hot Media”, and to “See for Yourself” based on “Cold Media”.
“CTRI by Francois Gadenne” writes a series of Workbooks, Handbooks & Notebooks about “Constructive Skepticism” with a process of public peer review on Substack. These books connect the dots of life-enhancing practices for the next generation, free of controlling algorithms, based on the lifetime experience of a retirement age entrepreneur, and continuously updated with insights from reading Wealth, Health, & Statistics (i.e. AI/ML/LLM) research papers on behalf of large companies as the co-founder of CTRI.