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

[Laeeth Isharc]

On Saturday, 28 July 2018 at 11:09:28 UTC, Abdulhaq wrote:
> 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 tough when dealing with genuine - Knightian uncertainty or 
even more radical versions.  When one doesn't even know the 
structure of the problem then maximising expected utility doesn't 
work.  One can look at capacities - Choquet and the like - but 
then its harder to say something useful about what you should do.

And I think when dealing with human action and institutions we 
are in a world of uncertainty more often than not.

>>
>> 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.

But it's a loop and one never takes a final decision to master D. 
Also habits, routines and structures _do_ shape perception.

>
> 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's entertaining.  I've not been accused of that before!  Bear 
in mind also I tend to write on my phone.

>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.

Yes I read Kahneman et al papers for the first time in 92 in the 
university library.  I speed-read his book, and I thought it was 
a bad book.  I work with a specialist in making decisions under 
uncertainty - she was the only person able to articulate to 
George Soros how he made money because he certainly couldn't, and 
she is mentioned in the preface to the revised version of 
Alchemy.  She has the same view as me - behavioural finance is 
largely a dead end.  One learns much more by going straight to 
the neuroeconomics and incorporating also the work of Dr Iain 
Macgilchrist.

Kahneman makes a mistake in his choice of dimension.  There's 
analytic and intuitive/gestalt and in my experience people making 
high stakes decisions are much less purely analytical than a 
believer in the popular Kahneman might suggest.

What I said about prediction being overrated isn't controversial 
amongst a good number of the best traders and business people in 
finance.  You might read Nassim Taleb also.

> 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.

Well it's a pity the D Android ecosystem isn't yet mature.  Still 
I remain in awe of the stubborn accomplishment of the man (with 
help) who got LDC to run on Android.

It's not that bad calling D from Java.  Some day I will see if I 
can help automate that - Kai started working on it already I 
think.

>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.

Since you already know D you need to answer a different question. 
  What's the chance the compiler will die on the relevant horizon, 
and how bad will it be for me if that happens.  Personally I'm 
not worried.   If D should disappear in a few years, it wouldn't 
be the end of the world to port things.  I just don't think 
that's very likely.

Of course it depends on your context.  The people who use D at 
work seem to be more principals who have the right to take the 
best decision as they see it then agents who must persuade others 
who are the real decision-makers.  That's a recipe for quiet 
adoption that's dispersed across many industries initially and 
for the early adopters of D being highly interesting people.  
Since, as the Wharton professor, Adam Grant observes, we are in 
an age where positive disruptors can achieve a lot within an 
organisation, that's also rather interesting.