[OT] Re: C's Biggest Mistake on Hacker News

[Abdulhaq]

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.