On Friday, 27 July 2018 at 23:42:47 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
For me, I think that managing money is about choosing to expose
your capital intelligently to the market, balancing the risk of
loss against the prospective gain and considering this in a
portfolio sense.
Prediction doesn't really come into that
I think this apparent difference of opinion is down to different
definitions of the word prediction. When I say prediction I mean
the assessment of what are the possible futures for a scenario
and how likely each one is. It can be conscious or unconscious. I
think my understanding of the word is not an uncommon one.
By my definition, when you balance the risk of loss (i.e. predict
how likely you are to lose money) against the prospective gain
(i.e. multiply the probability of each possible outcome by its
reward and sum the total to get a prospective value) then you
are, by my definition and therefore, for me, by definition,
making predictions.
It's not the prediction that matters but what you do. It's
habits, routines, perception, adaptation and actions that
matter.
I agree they are integral to our behaviour and habits and
routines do not involve the element of prediction. Perceptions
come before and actions take place after the decision process is
made (conscious or not) and so don't factor into this discussion
for me.
In truth I avoid discussions that are really just arguing about
definitions of words, but you made a couple of sweeping
bumper-stickery comments that trying to predict things was
usually a waste of time and as an alternative we should 'be the
change...'. I wholeheartedly agree we should 'be the change...'
but it's not an alternative to making predictions, it goes hand
in hand with it. I'm sure you've read Kahneman's Thinking, Fast
and Slow. You made a generalisation that applies to the 'fast'
part. I'm saying your universal rule is wrong because of the slow
part.
I learnt D many years ago just after Andrei's book came out. I
love it but it's on the shelf at the moment for me. I rarely get
time for side projects these days but when I do I want them to
run on Android with easy access to all the APIs and without too
much ado in the build setup. They must continue to work and be
supported with future versions of Android. At work, on Windows,
JDK8/JavaFX/Eclipse/maven and python/numpy/Qt/OpenCascade/VTK hit
the spot. Each project I start I give some very hard thought
about which development environment I'm going to use, and D is
often one of those options. The likely future of D on the
different platforms is an important part of that assessment,
hence 'predicting' the future of D, hard and very unreliable
though that is, is an important element in some of my less
trivial decisions.
