Not a big fan of Less Wrong, but yes to all of this.

And then you run across somebody who tries to tell you, not just that they can’t outguess the stock market, but that you’re not allowed to become good at it either. They claim that nobody is allowed to master the task at which they failed. Your uncle tripled his savings when he bet it all on GOOG, and this person tries to wave it off as luck. Isn’t that like somebody condescendingly explaining why juggling three balls is impossible, after you’ve seen with your own eyes that your uncle can juggle four?

I’ve literally had people tell me what I do in the stock market is “impossible.”

And I look in my bank account and it sure doesn’t seem impossible. And I tell them this. Then they tell me it’s “just luck” and I say, “Twenty plus years of luck seems pretty unlikely.”

People have a very hard time accepting that there is something that you can do easily which they cannot do at all. Which, fine, I will gladly take their money too.