Dopey

In my last post, on the topic of Warren Buffett and staff's voracious reading habit, I wrote:

Reading, and the consequent thinking, drives the generation of ideas, something I find also comes with exercising and writing.

Einstein begs to differ. Courtesy of a tweet from @Scaamberry, it appears that Einstein once said:

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

My opinion of this is that Einstein's definition of "reads too much" is an amount that none of us today are likely to get anywhere close to. 

If there is a Laffer Curve for reading, I'd suggest we are almost all certainly to the left of the maximum. 

Besides, does this look like a man with an aversion to reading?

The aforementioned Twitter account @Scaamberry linked to a review of Caan Berry's Betfair Trading Guide, and Pre Race Video Pack posted by a Ben on Sunday. Thanks also to Tony for emailing me this link.

Check the review out for yourself. I thought the review was quite respectful, fair and reasonable, so it was disappointing to see evidence of threats to the reviewer produced towards the end, for example:

I hope the police have indeed been informed as the reviewer stated. If you're genuinely threatened, of course this is an appropriate course of action. 

If someone writes something about you that you disagree with, surely a better response is to show why the claim is false. 

Since this review was published Mr Caan Berry has communicated explaining that his ‘Trademark’ is being infringed, which is not the case. Mr Berry does not have legally owned Trademarks for any name, or product mentioned on this review page. This we have checked with the relevant Trademark registry.

No trademarks have been registered, or infringed for any product or name on this review.

Subsequently, Mr Berry then tried to go down the ‘removal under defamation route’; again, this was declined as there are no defamatory, or false-hood statements on this review. When asked on multiple occasions for reference points to the offending content, Mr Berry could not provide this.

The lengths that Caan Berry appears to be willing to go to, led the reviewer to finish with:

Something else that cannot go unnoticed, again based on the determination to censor this review, is that going against an earlier section of this review, it becomes obvious that the publishing and product side on Caan Berry’s income must be larger than first anticipated, which suggests that possibly he is now a product vendor first, and a trader second.

That seems like a reasonable conclusion given the available evidence.