[nosianu]

> but when I did the math to see how much more it would have been

I have a suggestion for all the many similar problems around probability: Reframe it to be more correct.

Instead of looking against the arrow of time, backwards with full knowledge ask yourself the corresponding question looking forward, from where you are right now.

And then remember that that was the position you were in back then.

Questions that deal directly or indirectly with probabilities become confusing, and frankly stupid, when you violate the arrow of time and make "backward predictions". One should just not ask that question, not even for fun. They not only make no sense, our psyche suffers when we try, even if just a little.

This is part of another kind of problems: Asking why a given answer is wrong, for example in multiple choice questions. One of the best courses I took was an audio cassette pilot license theory course. One thing the speaker said about the multiple choice part of the exam was this. DO NOT (with a lot of emphasis and repetition in the audio) try to dwell on why a point is wrong. Concentrate on the true statements alone. Reason was similar to why raising the question why person XYS is NOT a pedophile still creates the association in the brains of people exposed to statements like that repeatedly. Apart from that, the number of potential wrong statements exceeds the valid ones by many orders of magnitude.

Similarly, just do not think about problems that deal with probabilities and predictions looking backward. It's just not a valid way to think about them. If you must, reformulate to make them forward-looking.

The problem of words and thoughts is the universe checks their validity only very rarely directly and immediately. If we don't restrain ourselves, our thoughts end up not representing reality more and more. Thinking requires quite a bit of self-discipline, we have to place the missing rails ourselves.

[trod1234]

This isn't useful or correct, and ends up being a bit circular getting into the weeds.

The focus should be that the normal math formula for bond valuation doesn't account for yearly real or projected inflation.

Almost everyone I have met doesn't know how to modify the standard formula correctly unless they've already done it at some point in the past. Its not a trivial exercise.

You have to understand the formulas well enough to modify them to account for the loss in purchasing power that compounds yearly, as a difference between the interest rate and real inflation over the bond terms.

Most years, inflation has been well above that 2% margin dramatically impacting the rate of return or real yield.

[nosianu]

> This isn't useful or correct

The formulas do not help you at all with the knowing. or not knowing, with being able to "predict" the past vs. being able to predict the future! They make assumptions.

I would make the claim my statement is useful for what I said, which was for somebody looking back at a decision of the long ago past with hindsight knowledge.

The post was not about somebody evaluating different investments either.

Oh and thanks, I guess, for completely disregarding that my comment was much more generalized? You threw away the vast majority of it.

[trod1234]

The vast majority of your argument's volume was promoting an incorrect way of thinking comparing two unrelated things, for a question not asked or really that useful.

You can't determine logical truth in a stochastic environment except after the fact when there is objective measure; and importantly there is no personal harm in doing this either, which is a direct contradiction to what you said.

You then went way out into the weeds when you started talking about pedophiles, and truth.

Any reasonable reader would throw away the vast majority of what you had to say as useless, or worse unstable.

The underlying concepts you mention indirectly, while correct in a narrow context in psychology, bad choice of example aside, also don't have anything to do with what's being said here in this topic.

[nosianu]

> The vast majority of your argument's volume was promoting an incorrect way of thinking comparing two unrelated things

Funny, that is exactly what I saw when I read your "arguments".

> Any reasonable reader would throw away the vast majority of what you had to say as useless

You are talking about your own baseless attacks. You don't even try to argue, you replace coming up with arguments completely with going on the attack with otherwise content-free words, just accusations and insults.