Jim Rogers: The worst crash of our lifetime is coming

Depends on your model of things. You could bake other assumptions into a distribution explaining why someone like him who has taken these past positions is in less likely than someone else to be right. You assume you we can't say anything informative about his prediction. Disagree.

It's actually quite useful I think, it keeps the idea alive in the background.

> You assume you we can't say anything informative about his prediction.

OK, can you show me a model that is better? What I'm saying is not dependent on the arbitrariness of subjective "baked-in assumptions", nor that each market observer has a subjective perspective and is not omniscient, nor is it about whether or not you may have the gut feeling that he's trying to scam you into unnecessary doomsday preparation. In stats terms: not about how each of us have different perspectives so KL-divergence > 0.

What I am saying is: all of the people who say "because these past positions never definitely happened yet, we should be more skeptical of his predictions than everyone else saying things will be just fine" are getting it wrong. You should be extremely skeptical of everyone asking you to withhold skepticism as if past observations (samples) prove the distribution is a stationary ergodic process (truly observing the generator).

When someone has predicted things successfully in the past, it means they answered a falsifiable question before it - so there is a burden of proof before you can call them a good predictor. But a prediction that has never been falsified does not demand a burden of proof, you can't say it's incorrect or correct at all - no matter the duration, the question "are his positions wrong?" is meaningless.

I am not privileging his opinion that much, tbh - imo, someone saying "catastrophes in the future will be worse" is a nearly-zero surprisal/maximum entropy statement. What influence could I exert over the outcomes that I depend on of processes far beyond what I can control? None. "just the way she goes, boys."

All I can do is say memento mori, insure myself against catastrophe (when the cost is negligible, so the waste is low if the catastrophe never came), and not dull my senses.. meaning that it is preferable to ignore salesmen reaffirming one another saying "but we've never sold this much before!" over to ignore someone without special insight who you suspect is only fomenting fear irrespective of if they stand to benefit, deceitfully or not, from that fear.

"We can infer Jim Rogers is unlikely to be correct about the future of catastrophes because the last 6 years of recorded performance did not contain a catastrophic event" != "somebody who had said everything is fine 6 years in a row would have been more correct than Jim Rogers over the last 6 years THEREFORE his predictions are less likely to be right", which ignores the point that ).

> but before that you have to go through several iterations of failure with a bunch of costly entitled developers before you get something which sort of approximates what you wanted and is so internally broken its almost impossible to extend

This is too often true, subject to the following observations:

- Project failure is almost always a management failure (no citations needed, really), because:

- The thing to be built is poorly conceived and explained by the leadership/stakeholders, who are seldom the devs

- The delivery schedule is wildly optimistic or infeasible, because unrealistic promises were made to customers or investors

- The operational parameters of the system (peak users, load, transactions, data size, availability, etc) are overestimated by the leadership by a couple of orders of magnitude and pushback tends to be career-limiting

- When the leadership eventually realizes the failure of its vision, it "pivots", and keeps pivoting at the speed of a turbine, "reframing" the so-called vision.

- The "costly, entitled" developers often come from some body shop which pays them $25/hour and charges $75 (illustrative values only)

- Costly, unentitled, competent developers probably ran for the hills or were rejected because they weren't "with the program" - they said something realistic in the interview.

- The process is not cheap or easy or risk free, yet many companies hire and pay as if it is.

- The mere act of getting cohesive requirements out of people is one of the hardest parts of software, and one of the largest reasons for failure.

- The rest isn't easy, either, unless it's a conceptual copy of some vanilla CRUD system that does nothing novel or "web scale" (whatever that is).

OTOH, I read some devs stating that software development is just bolting legos together, what's the problem?

If you are referring to these devs, I see your point, but they and their ilk are the creations of corporates and startups who pushed the view that devs are commodity items - resources - who aren't really skilled and can be churned out of bootcamps and will be good enough to meet the deadlines.

Now I am not criticizing bootcamps or the people who make it through them. There are many smart people who have no formal CS background who could make good devs, given time and experience. There are even more people who should not be allowed near a computer, sadly, who IMO are more commonly encountered.

I am criticizing the social forces that put money above useful education, profit above knowledge, ideology above science and engineering, the short term against the entire future.

Unless it's a 24-hour clock, then it's only once. Or the break isn't just a stoppage but simply a mis-setting. Or running fast or slow, at which point it will be right with some period other than twice/day. (The original phrase specifies a stopped clock, which eliminates the second two exceptions).